Proactive Conflict Detection for Collaborative Software Design
FLAME is an extensible framework that detects design-level conflicts in real-time, enabling distributed teams to collaborate more effectively on complex software architectures.
What is FLAME?
A comprehensive solution for managing complexity in collaborative software design
FLAME (Framework for Logging and Analyzing Modeling Events) is an extensible collaborative software design framework that provides facilities to detect design-level conflicts in a proactive way—before architects manually perform detection.
By capturing modeling changes as they are made and performing trial merging and conflict detection in the background, FLAME immediately detects newly arising conflicts and presents the results to architects. This proactive approach significantly reduces the cost and complexity of conflict resolution in distributed software development teams.
The framework explicitly handles resource-intensive computations necessary for high-order conflict detection by parallelizing and offloading the burden to remote nodes, ensuring that outstanding conflicts can be detected in reasonable time even with limited resources.
Key Features
Advanced capabilities for modern collaborative software development
Proactive Conflict Detection
Detects design conflicts before manual merging, enabling teams to address issues early in the development process when they're easier and less costly to resolve.
- Real-time conflict detection
- Background trial merging
- Immediate architect notification
Extensible Architecture
Designed with flexibility in mind, FLAME can integrate with various modeling tools and consistency checkers appropriate for your target system's domain.
- Pluggable modeling tool adapters
- Custom consistency checkers
- Domain-specific extensions
Distributed Processing
Leverages distributed computing to handle resource-intensive conflict detection, ensuring scalability for large projects and complex architectural models.
- Parallel conflict detection
- Remote node offloading
- Smart priority algorithms
Award-Winning Research
"Continuous Analysis of Collaborative Design" won the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2017)
Publications & Patents
Peer-reviewed research and intellectual property
-
Continuous Design Conflicts: Costs and Solutions
Jae Young Bang and Nenad Medvidovic
IEEE Software, 2018
Read Paper → -
Continuous Analysis of Collaborative Design
Jae Young Bang, Yuriy Brun, and Nenad Medvidovic
IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2017)
🏆 Best Paper Award
Read Paper → -
Proactive Detection of Higher-Order Software Design Conflicts
Jae Young Bang and Nenad Medvidovic
12th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA 2015)
Read Paper → | DOI → -
US Patent: Extensible Collaborative Software Modeling
US Patent Application US-2012-0089960-A1
Published April 14, 2012
View Patent →
Downloads
Get started with FLAME and its components