Protocol for a Systematic Mapping Study on Collaborative Model-Driven Software Engineering
This is an incremental effort to organize existing knowledge for researchers and practitioners in software engineering, without introducing new methods or data.
The paper addresses the lack of a comprehensive classification and comparison of approaches in collaborative model-driven software engineering (MDSE) by proposing a systematic mapping study to synthesize scattered research across domains.
Nowadays, collaborative modeling performed by multiple stakeholders is gaining a growing interest in both academia and practice. However, it poses a set of research challenges, such as large and complex models management, support for multi-user modeling environments, and synchronization mechanisms like models migration and merging, conflicts management, models versioning and rollback support. A body of knowledge in the scientific literature about collaborative model-driven software engineering (MDSE) exists. Still, those studies are scattered across different independent research areas, such as software engineering, model-driven engineering languages and systems, model integrated computing, etc., and a study classifying and comparing the various approaches and methods for collaborative MDSE is still missing. Under this perspective, a systematic mapping study (SMS) can help researchers and practitioners in (i) having a complete, comprehensive and valid picture of the state of the art about collaborative MDSE, and (ii) identifying potential gaps in current research and future research directions.