I already blogged about collaborative modeling but I would like to stand back from the
previous post, which was very technical, and introduce
the talk I will present with
Martin and
Benjamin at EclipseCon Europe.
Since several years now the Eclipse modeling platform provides useful tools which have help to democratize the use of modeling technologies. However those tools have raised issues linked to collaboration we start to better address.
To visualize and edit models in a graphical manner diagrams are often used. However usually
diagramming technologies do
not scale well and this is problematic as the more the models and their complexity grow the more one wants to work in group.
When you model with other people, one of the difficulty is to understand reasons behind their choices and design. Document them is of course necessary but the main difficulty is to keep documentation accurate across refactorings and changes.
In fact, often the more the time flies by, the more we
lost the intention, documentation being seen as a post-design step.
Collaborate means dealing with concurrent accesses. To enable them you have two strategies. One is to prevent conflicts either through models splitting or with locks. But
models splitting is
not well supported by tools and
coarse-grained locks are
not pratical.
The other strategy is to allows conflict happens and deals with them when they occurs. It looks like a dice game, and depending on the frequency, it could become hard to
deal with conflicts.
Interested by the subject ? Come to
the talk to discover what are the available technologies to address those concerns, and understand why collaboration matters in modeling.
