Similarity Detection in Collaborative Development of Object-Oriented Formal Specifications

The complexity of today’s software systems makes collaborative development necessary to accomplish tasks. Frameworks are necessary to allow developers perform their tasks independently yet collaboratively. Similarity detection is one of the major issues to consider when developing such frameworks. It allows developers to mine existing repositories when developing their own views of a software artifact, and it is necessary for identifying the correspondences between the views to allow merging them and checking their consistency. Due to the importance of the requirements specification stage in software development, this paper proposes a framework for collaborative development of ObjectOriented formal specifications along with a similarity detection approach to support the creation, merging and consistency checking of specifications. The paper also explores the impact of using additional concepts on improving the matching results. Finally, the proposed approach is empirically evaluated. Keywords—Collaborative Development, Formal methods, Object-Oriented, Similarity detection