UMLCollab : uma abordagem híbrida para modelagem colaborativa de modelos UML

Abstract

Collaborative software modeling is a trend to increase business productivity and reduce costs. However, the two main types of collaboration still present problems, for instance: synchronous, despite avoiding conflicts, in scenarios with several developers acting on the model at the same time, it disrupts the cognitive process of the developers and the asynchronous leads to complicated and costly steps of conflict resolution. Therefore, this work proposes the "UMLCollab", a hybrid approach of collaborative modeling of UML models. UMLCollab allows each user receive synchronous updates from other users and send their changes asynchronously, combined with the automatic and manual merge technique. The proposed approach was evaluated through a controlled experiment, which allowed comparing it with traditional approaches (synchronous and asynchronous). The results collected show that UMLCollab: (1) showed an intermediate productivity (effort) in relation to traditional forms of collaboration; (2) showed a higher level of correctness considering the maximum of the correctness samples collected in relation to the synchronous collaboration; (3) received a better perception of the participants in the results of productiveness; and (4) was confirmed by most participants as a facilitator in conflict resolution and modeling interference reduction. Finally, the results are encouraging and show the potential of using UMLCollab to support collaborative modeling in real environments.