Activity-Based Model Synchronization and Defects Detection for Small Teams

Software modelling deals with multiple problems such as defect detection, synchronization and authorship assessment. These problems are obviously solved by complex tools for static and manual analysis of models. But an origin of these problems is in dynamical part of software modelling process - activities of developers, that can be incrementally processed right in developers' environments. So, methods that utilize activities should be more suitable for small agile teams or in learning process. In this paper, we present novel model synchronization and real-time defects detection methods based on developers' activities, and the tool SmallTEAmsHelper, which collects developers' activities over models, detects defects at the time they arise and provides an incremental model synchronization. We also present results of SmallTEAmsHelper deployment to students of the course Principles of software engineering and collected dataset of students' activities, which will be used for future work in an area of activity-based approaches.