Collaborative Modeling Enabled By Version Control

Abstract

Model-Driven Software Development is a key field in software development activities which is well-suited to design and develop large-scale software systems. Developing and maintaining large-scale model-driven software systems entail a need for collaborative modeling by a large number of software designers and developers. As long as software models are constantly changed during development and maintenance, collaborative modeling requires frequently sharing of model changes between collaborators. Thereby, a solid change representation support for model changes plays an essential role for collaborative modeling systems. This paper focuses on the problem of model change representation for collaborative modeling. It introduces a meta-model generic, operation-based and textual difference language to represent model changes in collaborative modeling. This paper also demonstrates a collaborative modeling application Kotelett.