Product Line Diff Driver

The PLADiff driver provides a UI which presents the means to graphically invoke the PLADiff C2 component in order to calculate the architectural differences between two product line architectures. To begin this process, one must first open up both architectures in the File Manager/Invoker and then invoke the PLADiff Driver. There are 5 steps the user must follow in order to successfully calculate the difference between two architectures:

Step 1: Select the type of starting point
To begin, first select the type of starting points desired from the radio button at the top.  If Type-Version is selected, the starting points will be a a particular version of a component type. If ArchStructure is selected, the starting points will be ArchStructures within the documents. 

Note: the starting points for both architectures must be of the same type.

Step 2: Select the architectures to diff on
The architectures to perform the differencing on can be selected from the two drop down  lists.  The original (base) architecture is the drop down list on the left hand side whereas the new architecture is on the right hand side (under their respective labels).  The original architecture and the new architecture can be  from the same file.

Note: If an element exists only in the new architecture, it is considered an "addition".  If the element only exists in the original/base architecture, it is considered an "removal".   

Step 3: Select the starting points
To select Type-Version starting points, make sure the appropriate radio button is selected.  First choose the desired component type and then select the desired version.  A starting point must be selected for both the original and new architecture.  An example of this is shown below:

To select ArchStructure starting points, make sure the appropriate radio button is selected.  Then click on the desired ArchStructure from the list presented.  A starting point must be selected for both the original and new architecture.  An example of this is shown below:

Step 4: Specify the diff document URL/URN
Next the user must specify the URL/URN for the resulting diff document.  The diff document will capture all the differences found between the original and the new architecture.  The name specified here can be in any name convention, since saving the resulting document to disk is done through the File Manager/Invoker.

Step 5: Perform the diff
Finally, just click on the the Diff button to start the differencing process. The buttons and drop down lists will be disabled during the diff process and reactivated when the process completes. A dialog box will also appear to inform the user that the diff process has finished and the resulting document will be visible in the File Manager/Invoker. If an error is encountered during the diff process, a dialog will appear informing the user that a problem was encountered and the stack trace will be printed to the command line.