Earticle

Collaborative development has been identified as one of the most important keys to the success of a software project. An effective collaboration has a great impact on the requirements specification phase since the latter involves several people specifying the requirements of various stakeholders. Such collaboration requires automatically detecting the parallel changes or revisions that are made to a shared specification. These revisions are aimed at reaching a specification that satisfies the needs of all the stakeholders. Hence, combining these changes systematically must also incorporate the detection and resolution of any merging conflicts in order to commit them properly to the shared specification leading to a sound and consistent result. A new approach is proposed in this paper to extract and integrate the parallel changes made to Object-Oriented formal specifications in a collaborative development environment. A formal foundation is proposed to uniformly define merging conflicts and the proposed approach allows combining the parallel changes made while addressing any merging conflicts at the same time. Evaluating the developed algorithms has shown good signs in terms of accuracy and scalability.