A Conflicts Detection Approach for Merging Formal Specification Views

Specifying software requirements is an important, complicated and error prone task. It involves the collaboration of several people specifying requirements that are gathered through several stakeholders. During this process, developers working in parallel introduce and make modifications to requirements until reaching a specification that satisfies the stakeholders ’ requirements. Merge conflicts are inevitable when integrating the modifications made by different developers to a shared specification. Thus, detecting and resolving these conflicts is critical to ensure a consistent resulting specification. A conflicts detection approach for merging Object-Oriented formal specifications is proposed in this paper. Conflicts are classified, formally defined and detected based on the results of a proposed differencing algorithm. The proposed approach has been empirically evaluated, and the experimental results are discussed in this paper