Researchers Map Hidden Language of Software Change to Cut Development Costs
A new scoping review identifies how different software systems track and describe changes to their underlying models—a seemingly technical issue with real budget implications. Companies that adopt the wrong approach waste time recovering lost information about what actually changed, slowing updates to interconnected systems across their operations.
Originaltitel: How and Why is Change Modeled? – A Scoping Literature Review
<p>Models and metamodels change, entailing efforts to keep related artifacts consistent, i.e., to reflect the implications of the changes on them. In order to assess these implications, the changes or evolution steps themselves are, in most cases, of highest interest, compared to the states of the models or metamodels. While the states can be used to derive the changes, some information on the actual changes might get lost, e.g., whether an empty class has been renamed or deleted and re-added. The use of deltas to describe changes is not limited to models and metamodels, but is also employed in other research areas. To get an overview of the used concepts and how they compare, we did a scoping literature review in the field of computer science, focused on modeling and related fields. We compared the different approaches in regard to how they model the change, their ability to model atomic or composite changes, their completeness in modeling all possible changes, as well as their purpose. This overview allows for more efficient concept re-use across domains in regard to the modeling of changes and the different use cases realized with them.url: https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MODELS-C68889.2025.00065</p>