Collaborative Software Engineering Using Metamodel-Driven Approach

A metamodel-driven approach to collaborative software engineering is presented. The approach employs optimistic replication of UML models and a novel semantics-based method for reconciliation of long-lived transactions in collaborative environments using metamodel information. The research described addresses the general problem of semantically consistent and functionally meaningful reconciliation of divergent replicas and enables significant simplification and formalization of its solution. The software engineering application is presented to illustrate how the approach can be effectively applied for cooperatively elaborated UML diagrams under strong consistency guarantees for produced software artifacts.