COMMitMDE 2018 - 3rd International Workshop on Collaborative Modelling in MDE Jan Bosch Sébastien Gérard Dimitris Kolovos Chalmers University of Technology CEA, LIST University of York Sweden France UK Email: jan.bosch@chalmers.se Email: sebastien.gerard@cea.fr Email: dimitris.kolovos@york.ac.uk Ivano Malavolta Henry Muccini Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam University of L’Aquila, DISIM Department The Netherlands Italy Email: i.malavolta@vu.nl Email: henry.muccini@univaq.it Abstract—Collaborative modeling is gaining a growing interest workshop had the dual role of investigating the potential in both academia and industry. However, several research chal- impact of collaborative SE methods and principles [4] into lenges remain open, including scalability, support for multi-user MDE practices, as well as MDE support to collaborative SE. modeling environments, model versioning, migration, compari- son, merging and conflict management. More specifically, the objective of this workshop was to bring The workshop aims at assessing the state of the art and prac- together experts in model-driven and collaborative software tice on Collaborative MDE, creating new synergies between tool engineering in order to give evidence on the ongoing research vendors, researchers, and practitioners, informing the community and development on this topic. Such a high-level objective can about the new means for collaborative MDE, and identifying be decomposed into the following details action points: needs and research gaps in the collaborative MDE area. COMMitMDE 2018 brought together researchers and prac- • Assess the state of the art and practice on Collaborative titioners to explore (i) the impact of collaborative SE methods MDE; and principles on MDE practices and (ii) how MDE methods • Create links between tool vendors, researchers, and prac- and techniques can support collaborative software engineering activities. titioners; Index Terms—MDE, collaboration, collaborative MDE • Inform the community about new means for collaborative MDE; I. A BOUT COMM IT MDE • Identify the needs and gaps in the Collaborative MDE community. A collaborative Model-Driven Engineering MDE approach is a method or technique in which: (i) models are first-class The topics proposed for discussion during the 3rd COM- artifacts that drive both the software development activities MitMDE workshop are the following: collaborative MDE and the other model-based tasks in the context of a software design, requirements engineering with collaborative MDE, engineering process; (ii) at least one repository exists for man- metamodel-level collaboration, multi-view collaborative MDE, aging the persistence of models; (iii) at least one modelling the role of file repositories (e.g. Git, SVN) in collaborative tool [1] exists for allowing each stakeholder involved in the modeling, web-based model editing, collaborative MDE prac- modelling activities to create, edit, and delete models; (iv) at tices, academic and industrial needs in collaborative MDE, least one communication means exists for allowing involved case studies and experience reports, scalable repositories for stakeholders to be aware of what the other stakeholders collaborative modeling, multi-user modeling environments, collaborating with them are doing (e.g., chat, social network, synchronization mechanisms like models migration and merg- wiki, asynchronous messaging system, issue tracker); (v) at ing, conflict management, model versioning and comparison, least one collaboration means exists for allowing stakeholders security and IP management. to work on the modelling artifacts collaboratively (e.g., model COMMitMDE 2018 solicited regular research papers with versioning systems, model merging mechanisms, systems for a maximum length of 10 pages proposing and discussing model conflict management and visualization) [2], [3]. research results or industrial experiences related to collab- The workshop was co-located with the ACM/IEEE 21th orative MDSE, as well as tool demonstration papers with International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Lan- a maximum length of 5 pages presenting interesting tools guages & Systems (MODELS), and represented an active supporting collaborative MDSE. Four papers have been ac- forum for practitioners and researchers. The COMMitMDE cepted for publication and presented during the workshop. The COMMitMDE 2018 website is available on-line1 . The COMMitMDE 2016 (http://cs.gssi.infn.it/commitmde2016) program of the workshop comprised a full day of activities. was co-located with MODELS 2016 in St. Malo. Four in- vited talks were also given during the workshop. In the first II. R ESEARCH C ONTRIBUTIONS keynote presentation, Di Ruscio and Franzago reported on In the following the main contributions of each papers ongoing work that, by looking at the literature on Collaborative presented at COMMitMDE 2018 are reported. The interested Software Engineering, creates a taxonomy for Collaborative reader can refer to the official proceedings of the workshop Model-driven Software Engineering. Syriani in his keynote for the full text of the presented papers. defined the requirements for multi-view collaborative modeling In their paper, titled Continuous integration support in and reported on the AToMPM collaborative MDE framework. modeling tools, Robbert Jongeling, Jan Carlson, Antonio Ci- The keynote, titled Scaling up MDE to support large ge- cchetti and Federico Ciccozzi presented their study on the ographically distributed teams - an experience report and combination of Continuous Integration (CI) and Model-Based given by Vinay Kulkarni, reported on the author’s experiences Development (MBD). The authors of the paper identified with applying model-driven engineering principles in Tata. relevant aspects of modeling tools to support CI practices. In the fourth keynote speech, titled MDE Collaboration: Then, eight modeling tools have been evaluated in terms of Temporality and Ergonomy in the Cloud, the GenMyModel their levels of support for each of the aspects. In the evaluated Solution, Aranega presented the principles and characteristics tools, different maturity levels of support for the considered of the GenMyModel project. The workshop attracted 35-40 aspects have been observed. Overall, some challenges, but no attendees and was one of the best attended satellite events insurmountable impediments to introducing CI practices in of the conference. The proceedings of the workshop are MBD have been identified. available on-line through the CEUR Workshop Proceedings In the second paper, titled Challenges for Reuse in Collabo- series (available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1717/). rative Modeling Environments, Omar Alam, Jonathan Corley, III. O UTLOOK Constantin Masson, and Eugene Syriani identified key chal- lenges facing reuse in collaborative MDE environments and We consider COMMitMDE topics to be foundational to investigated the support provided by existing environments. the MDE community, and orthogonal to most of the methods This study focusses on the state of practice in existing environ- and techniques developed by the MODELS community. As ments and shows that their support for reuse is not sufficient. briefly reported above, COMMitMDE looks at model editing, The identified challenges will help guide the development and model merging, conflict management, repositories, multi-view, improvement of modeling tools to provide better support for modeling and metamodeling from a collaborative perspective. reuse. For this reason, we are already planning for COMMitMDE In the third paper, titled Handling Constraints in Model 2019; it will be proposed as a co-located event of the MOD- Versioning, Alessandro Rossini, Adrian Rutle, Yngve Lamo, ELS conference, hoping to have the same success as the one and Uwe Wolter proposed an approach to constraint-aware achieved by this year’s edition. model versioning; the proposed approach handles constraints ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS in model merging, conflict detection and conflict resolution; A special thanks goes to Mirco Franzago, who supported the approach is based on the Diagram Predicate Framework the organizing committee through many key activities related (DPF), which is based on category theory and graph transfor- to the workshop and helped in the management of the paper mation. submissions, strongly contributing to the the overall success In the last paper, title Delta-Driven Collaborative Model- of the workshop. We would like to thank the authors and the ing, Maik Appeldorn, Dilshod Kuryazov and Andreas Winter program committee for their hard and precious work before, present their application of a metamodel-generic, operation- during, and after the workshop. based and textual difference language to UML Designer, an ex- isting domain-specific modeling tool. Also, they demonstrate R EFERENCES a collaborative modeling application. The proposed approach [1] Marco Brambilla, Jordi Cabot, and Manuel Wimmer. Model-driven soft- is validated in the context of UML activity diagrams. ware engineering in practice, volume 1. Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2012. A. Previous Editions [2] Mirco Franzago, Davide Di Ruscio, Ivano Malavolta, and Henry Muccini. Collaborative model-driven software engineering: a classification frame- CoMMitMDE 2017 (http://cs.gssi.it/commitmde2017/) was work and a research map. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, co-located with MODELS 2017 in Austin. The presentations PP(99):1–1, 2017. [3] Mirco Franzago, Ivano Malavolta, Davide Di Ruscio, and Henry Muccini. of CoMMitMDE were interwoven with those of ME (Models Collaborative model-driven software engineering: a classification frame- and Evolution - 4 papers) and the joint event was attended work and a research map [extended abstract]. In Proceedings of the 40th by 20-25 people. Accepted papers were published in the International Conference on Software Engineering Companion, ICSE-C ’18, pages 535–535. IEEE Press, May 2018. joint proceedings of MODELS 2017 Satellite Events (http: [4] Ivan Mistrk, John Grundy, Andr Hoek, and Jim Whitehead, editors. //ceur-ws.org/Vol-2019/). Collaborative Software Engineering. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. 1 http://cs.gssi.it/commitmde2018/