The requirements, structure and behavior of a software system are often abstracted in various types of models. Comparing models and detecting their differences is a highly relevant task in many applications. Due to the diversity of model-specific properties and syntax, model-specific differencing techniques must usually be built from scratch, which requires significant amount of thought and effort. In this talk, I will present an overview of my recent work on GenericDiff, a general framework for model comparison. I will discuss the design rationale and key ideas of GenericDiff, why such a general framework is feasible, what are the main challenges in designing GenericDiff, and how GenericDiff addresses them. Furthermore, I will discuss the applications of GenericDiff in two on-going research projects, extractive reengineering a family of similar software product variants into a software product line and debugging the changing behaviors of concurrent programs. In the first application, GenericDiff has been applied to compare product feature models at the requirement level and compare program dependence graphs at the implementation level. In the second application, GenericDiff has been applied to compare the operational semantics models (Labeled Transition Systems) of concurrent programs. Through these two applications, I will demonstrate that GenericDiff can support an easy and quick development of model comparators for diverse types of models.

Dr. XING Zhenchang received his Ph.D. degree from University of Alberta, Canada in 2008, under the supervision of Prof. Eleni Stroulia. He is now working as a Lee Kuan Yew Research Fellow at School of Computing, National University of Singapore. His research focuses on software reuse and evolution, model-driven engineering, and mining software systems. He is the program-committee member for ICSM 2008/2009/2010; he also served as program-committee member for CASCON 2006 and 2007, as expert-review panel member for ASE 2007, and as tool-demonstration co-chair for WCRE 2007. He received the best paper award at the 22nd International Conference on Software Maintenance in 2006.