Making the Evolution of Graphical Models Visible

With adoption of the UML and other graphical languages by software industry, graphical models became a cornerstone in today’s software development practice. As other artefacts such as program source code, graphical models evolve over time and are, thus, put regularily under version control. In order to deeply understand the role an artefact plays within a project, it is sometimes helpful to review the history of this artefact. While there are numerous tools available that make it easy for a user to grasp the evolution of textual files (or even portions of it), an adequate support for graphical files has remained to be an area of niche products. In this paper, we argue that a better support for reviewing the version history of graphical files can facilitate the work with graphical models. In order to support this claim, we implemented a prototypcical tool that can extract and display the version history of any graphical file stored in a GitHub-repository. In addition, users can annotate each version of a file with comments, what turns our tool into a review tool for software projects. Recently, we started to use the tool is a software engineering course to give students better feedback on complex UML models they have to develop iteratively.