Enhancing MDWE with Collaborative Live Coding

Abstract

Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) methodologies enhance productivity and offer a high level view on software artifacts. Coming from classical software development processes, many existing approaches rather enforce a top-down structure instead of supporting a cyclic approach that integrates smoother with modern agile development. State-of-the-art MDWE should integrate established and emerging Web development features, such as (near real-time) collaborative modeling and shared editing on the generated code. The challenge when covering these requirements lies with synchronizing source code and models, an essential need to cope with regular changes in the software architecture and provide the flexibility needed for agile MDWE. In this paper, we present an approach that enables cyclic, collaborative development of Web applications by using traceability in model-to-text transformations to deal with the synchronization. We adopt a trace-based solution for collaborative live coding in order to merge manual code changes into Web application models and ensure that the open-source code repositories reflect both model and manual code refinements. Our evaluation shows a reliable code to model synchronization and investigates the usability in collaborative software development settings. With our approach we contribute to integrating agile development practices into MDWE.