Version management in Unified Modeling Language

Change in requirements leads to evolution of software systems. Evolution of software projects can be captured using version management mechanisms. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a well known modeling language for software projects. One of the limitations of the UML is lack of support for version management. The paper suggests semantics based version management for projects represented using UML Class diagrams of UML are used for representing the project as a semantic entity called Unified Representation of Artifacts (LIRA) graph. Version propagation can be captured with class diagrams. Also, the paper considers the Object Oriented (OO) issues like inheritance, aggregation, association etc, for propagating a change in software system. Various cases of change propagation have been explored depending upon the attributes that participate in the change. Also, the role of accessibility of attributes such a private, public and protected in version management is discussed. Different versions of a project have been considered to present the scenario of the change management.