Automated Merging of Software Prototypes

Abstract

As software becomes more complex, more sophisticated development and maintenance methods are needed to ensure software quality. Computer-aided prototyping achieves this via quickly built and iteratively updated prototypes of the intended system. This process requires automated support for keeping track of many independent changes and for exploring different combinations of alternative changes and refinements. This article formalizes the update and change merging process, extends the idea to multiple changes to the same base prototype, and introduces a new method of slicing prototypes. Applications of this technology include automatic updating of different versions of existing software with changes made to the baseline version of the system, integrating changes made by different design teams during development, and checking consistency after integration of seemingly disjoint changes to the same software system.