Interactive Model Fusion: A User-Centered Approach for Combining Graph-Based Visual Models

by Rainer Lutz

Nowadays graph-based visual models are an important means to represent ideas and concepts or to abstract from processes of the real world. In software engineering, but also in many other application scenarios, comparing and merging of such models is an important task. Since software development is a teamwork activity, similar models may be created or modified by several people. This can result in multiple solutions to the same problem. While some of these solutions can be reconciled automatically, others are conflicting such that human intervention is required. However, current research often focuses on the algorithmic part of this problem and typically does not take users' needs into account. In this thesis, model comparison and merging is addressed from a user-centered perspective. First, it presents a qualitative evaluation on how humans manually combine models. The gained results include both a description as well as a categorization of the observed human behavior and thus allow for understanding this problem from a tool-independent point of view. Second, it describes how these findings were leveraged to develop a number of interactive tools with respect to several application scenarios. All of them support users in discovering similarities and differences between models and, depending on the application scenario, enable creating a merged model. Several qualitative user studies evaluate the usability of these tools and give insights into the workflows and strategies of potential users. In summary, the results of this thesis are a first step into the direction of providing mature tools and interactive visualizations for model comparison and merging.

300 pages, Paperback

Published June 6, 2016