A Matching Approach for Object-Oriented Formal Specifications

Software merging is needed at different stages of software development to combine the artifacts created or modified by the parallel work of the different developers involved in the project. An accurate matching approach is the key to successful software merging as well as to conflicts identification. In this paper, a new matching approach for Object-Oriented formal specifications is proposed. Object-Z is used as a specification language. However, the proposed approach is meant to be applicable to a wide range of Object-Oriented software artifacts. Merging formal requirements specifications is motivated by the fact that it could help in identifying (and resolving) conflicts that will cost higher to identify (and resolve) at later stages of software development. The proposed approach incorporates heuristics for both syntactic and structural similarity. The empirical results obtained through a prototype implementation of the proposed approach were very encouraging.