The Virtual Developer: Integrating Code Generation and Manual Development with Conflict Resolution

Model Driven Development (MDD) requires proper tools to derive the implementation code from the application models. However, the integration of handwritten and generated code is a long-standing issue that affects the adoption of MDD in the industry. This article presents a model and code co-evolution approach that addresses such a problem a posteriori, using the standard collision detection capabilities of Version Control Systems to support the semi-automatic merge of the two types of code. We assess the proposed approach by contrasting it with the more traditional template-based, forward-engineering process, adopted by most MDD tools.