MOVE - Model-driven Evolution of Web Applications

Due to the ever growing importance of the Web, more and more software applications are developed as Web applications. These Web applications are rapidly changing due to business needs, technological innovations, and changes in legislation to name just a few reasons for evolution. It is commonly known, however, that quality decreases when software such as Web applications evolve. The main reason for this is that evolution of software is still undervalued in software development in general and in Web application development in particular. The most promising way to tackle this problem is to consider changes as first class-entities through the whole software development process and to set active countermeasures to mitigate the negative effects of software evolution. Model-driven Web Engineering (MDWE) has been proposed for improving the development of Web applications providing appropriate abstraction mechanisms to specify Web applications in terms of platform independent models and to generate platform specific implementations automatically. Several MDWE languages, methods, and tools emerged within the last decade. All of these approaches, however, neglect the importance of changes, which hampers understanding of evolution, consistent co-evolution of dependent artefacts, and parallel development on the same model, the latter being the prerequisite for team-based software development. The aim of this project is to complement MDWE by proposing a framework for model-driven evolution of Web applications (MOVE). First, MOVE supports specifying, executing, and detecting composite operations such as refactorings, allowing to reason about the intent of a change which, in contrast, may not be captured when only atomic operations such as create, update, and delete are considered. Second, MOVE offers coupled operations as a means for consistent co-evolution of dependent artefacts ensuring, e.g., intra-diagram and inter-diagram consistency. Finally, MOVE provides precise conflict detection and supportive conflict visualization for producing a consolidated version incorporating parallel, potentially conflicting, changes, representing the cornerstone for evolving models in a team-based fashion. The methodology for evaluating the proposed framework builds on four major pillars. First, MOVE will be implemented as a proof-of-concept prototype for the most prominent Web modeling language WebML in terms of an Eclipse Plug-in. Second, the prototype will be applied in case studies using models and change requests taken from real-world examples. Third, the prototype will be evaluated in experiments using synthetic test cases to verify the evolution capabilities of MOVE. Fourth, the prototype will be applied in an empirical study with students from our Web engineering course at the Vienna University of Technology (around 200 students every year) to show the usability of MOVE.