A study of change management of Uml diagrams

One of the most critical factors controlling the success of software product development efforts is the management of product changes during development. It is characteristic of software development that everything changes, or can change, continually throughout the process. Requirements can change, the architecture can change, designs can change, and for each of these, the implementation must change. Of course, some changes are natural and necessary. However, it is very common for teams to propose excessive changes that easily overwhelm the budget allocated for the product. Development efforts fail because the effect of each of the changes proposed is not understood until well after it is too late to salvage the project; Because of this, change control is now recognized as a needed component of most software development efforts. It is standard practice to employ a configuration management system that keeps a textual database containing a description of successive versions of the product. If the important changes are textual, they can easily be observed by comparing the text recorded by the configuration management system. Using the most modern development tools however, product changes are represented as changed diagrams; In this thesis we review the literature of diagram differencing tools and propose a new approach to presenting the differences between two successive versions of UML diagrams. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of our approach and contrast our results with previous attempts at solving this problem