Merging cloned Alloy models with colorful refactorings

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2022

Authors

Liu, C (Author) Other; Macedo, N (Author) FEUP; Cunha, A (Author) Other

Conference proceedings International

Title: SCIENCE OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING

Pages: 173-191

23rd Brazilian Symposium on Formal Methods (SBMF)

ELECTR NETWORK, NOV 25-27, 2020

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Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00T-216

DOI: 10.1016/j.scico.2022.102829

Abstract (EN): Likewise to code, clone-and-own is a common way to create variants of a model, to explore the impact of different features while exploring the design of a software system. Previously, we have introduced Colorful Alloy, an extension of the popular Alloy language and toolkit to support feature-oriented design, where model elements can be annotated with feature expressions and further highlighted with different colors to ease understanding. In this paper we propose a catalog of refactoring laws for Colorful Alloy models, and show how they can be used to iteratively merge cloned Alloy models into a single featureannotated colorful model, where the commonalities and differences between the different clones are easily perceived, and more efficient aggregated analyses can be performed. We then show how these refactorings can be composed in an automated merging strategy that can be used to migrate Alloy clones into a Colorful Alloy SPL in a single step. The paper extends a conference version [1] by formalizing the semantics and type system of the improved Colorful Alloy language, allowing the simplification of some rules and the evaluation of their soundness. Additional rules were added to the catalog, and the evaluation extended. The automated merging strategy is also novel.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 24