A Study of Collaborative Efforts and Proposed Visualizations in Domain-Specific Modeling Environment

Being an integral part of the software system development process, collaboration is demanded in every stage of the process lifecycle. Ensuring the effectiveness and correctness of collaborative efforts is challenging, therefore, establishing a structural procedure is generally good practice to avoid unnecessary coordination overhead. As the need for complex software systems increases, collaboration in the context of model-based editing environment attracts more attention than traditional text-based editing environments because models offer more straightforward representation of systems. In addition, domain-specific modeling (DSM) has gradually gained more popularity over general-purpose modeling because of the domain concepts and abstractions DSM supports. Undoubtedly, the sophisticated structures and content within models present new challenges to researchers as stricter consistency requirements need to be met and better representations developed. This research discusses demands and concerns for collaborative modeling in software engineering. Three existing model-based collaborative editing platforms, D-Praxis, DiCoMEF, and GRACE, are examined in the paper, giving insight to the development of taxonomies for concurrency modeling and conflict management. To complement the collaboration infrastructure in complex system modeling, this paper also proposes enhanced visualization approaches implemented in a web-and cloud-based domain-specific modeling environment, WebGME, developed at Vanderbilt University. Finally, several interesting future directions for collaborative model editing research are highlighted, focusing on improving the collaborative modeling effort.