CHECKSUM: tracking changes and measuring contributions in cooperative systems modeling

Models are often used to represent various types of systems. This is especially true for software systems, where cooperating teams create models using a modeling language (e.g., UML). In cooperative modeling scenarios, it is useful to identify contributions and changes performed by individuals and teams. This paper presents a technique called CHECKSUM, which monitors the cooperative work done on models and maintains an immutable changelog. CHECKSUM uses its changelog to measure contributions based on points, time, and quality, and to enable the auditing of a model’s change-history. This paper also presents GEneric Meta-Model (GEMM). The latter unifies the underlying representation of different types of models that follow varying visualization patterns including box and line, container, and interleaving. GEMM enables CHECKSUM to support an extensible variety of model types. We developed a prototype tool that realizes CHECKSUM’s concepts and integrates it into two existing modeling tools. We conducted two studies to evaluate CHECKSUM from two perspectives: technical and user. The studies yielded positive results concerning various qualities including integrability into existing tools, effectiveness, efficiency, usability, and usefulness.