Collaborative Modelling with Version Control

Modelling and version control both play key roles in industrial-scale software development, yet their integration has proved difficult. Significant effort has been expended on improving file-based merging of modellers’ work, but empirical research shows the results of that approach still leave much to be desired in practice. Approaches based on multi-user modelling databases have often foundered by locking too broadly, thus preventing work on different elements in the same model, or by handling versioning themselves, leading to a silo. This article presents an approach to combining multi-user modelling with any external version control system, with no merging and no lock-outs.