State-based vs. Operation-based Change Tracking

In recent years, models are increasingly used throughout the entire lifecycle in software engineering projects. In effect, the need for managing these models in terms of change tracking and versioning emerged. However, many publications recognized that existing approaches for Version Control (VC) do not work well on graph-like models, and therefore proposed alternative techniques and methods. They can be categorized into two different classes: state-based and operation-based approaches. There are publications that show advantages of operationbased over state-based approaches in selected use cases. However, there are no results available on the advantages of operation-based approaches in the most common use case of a VC system: review and understand change. In this paper, we present and discuss both approaches and their use cases. Moreover, we present a design of an empirical study to compare a state-based with an operation-based approach in the use case of reviewing and understanding change.