Enabling Workspace Awareness for Collaborative Software Modeling

Distributed software modeling is common today, although geographically separated designers need to overcome several communication challenges. Software designers typically use version control systems (VCSs) to integrate their work. However, existing VCSs do not continuously inform all designers of new design decisions and conflicts. Designers often introduce conflicts precisely because they are unaware of such design decisions. Research on collaborative implementation has explored workspace awareness to deal with this challenge, and observed that providing workspace awareness facilitates conflict detection and resolution. However, existing workspace awareness tools typically do not work well as-is for collaborative modeling. We envision the emergence of new types of collaborative modeling tools that provide various forms of workspace awareness.