Towards Online Collaborative Multi-view Modelling

Increasingly, distributed software development teams rely on online collaboration tools to work together in real time. Collaborative textual editors are intuitive, since the position of the cursor and the currently selected text, if any, tell other collaborators what part of the text/code a developer is currently focusing on or editing. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) advocates using models as the primary development artifacts, and to be most effective, the system is described at different levels of abstraction from multiple points of view. This poses additional challenges for online collaboration, as the current focus of the developer and the scope of his changes are often less clear, in particular when the modelling language(s) and views use graphics or have hierarchical or other kinds of dependencies. This paper proposes two algorithms that exploit the metamodels of the involved modelling languages to visualize a collaborator’s change in a multi-view modelling environment. The first algorithm determines the most concise way to highlight the elements that are impacted by a change made by a remote developer in the current views of the local developer. The second algorithm delays the deletion of a model element as long as that element is still being referred to from a different view, and notifies the impacted developers, offering them a chance to collaboratively discuss the deletion or undo the deletion if desired. The proposed algorithms are evaluated by applying them on the Reusable Aspect Models (RAM) metamodel.