Decomposition recovery extension to the Computer Aided Prototyping System (CAPS) change-merge tool
Publisher: Naval Postgraduate School; Available from National Technical Information Service
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Monterey, Calif; Springfield, Va
Language: eng
Number of pages: 193
Description: A promising use of Computer Aided Prototyping System (CAPS) is to support concurrent design. Key to      success in this context is the ability to automatically and reliably combine and integrate the prototypes produced      in concurrent efforts. Thus, to be of practical use in this as well as most prototyping contexts, a CAPS tool must      have a fast, automated, reliable prototype integration capability. The current CAPS Change Merge Tool is fast,      automated, and uses a highly reliable formalized semantics based change merging method to integrate, or change      merge, prototypes which are written in Prototype System Description Language (PSDL). This method can      guarantee correct merges, but it loses the prototype's design decomposition structure in the process. The post      merge prototype is fully functional, but the design decomposition structure vital to prototype understandability      must be manually recovered before post merge prototyping can continue. The delay incurred is unacceptable in      a rapid prototyping context. This thesis presents a software design and Ada implementation for a formalized      algorithm which extends the current CAPS Change Merge Tool to automatically and reliably recover a merged      prototype's design decomposition structure. The algorithm is based in formal theoretical approaches to software      change merging and includes a method to automatically report and resolve structural merge conflicts. With this      extension to the Change Merge Tool, CAPS prototyping efforts, concurrent or otherwise, can continue post      merge with little or no delay.
Notes: Thesis advisors, Valdis Berzins, LuQi.

Thesis (M.S. in Software Engineering) Naval Postgraduate School, Sept. 1997.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 189)

Also Available online.

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dk/dk cc:9116 04/09/98.