Starting Model Development in Distributed Teams with Incremental Model Splitting

The rising impact of software development in globally distributed teams strengthens the need for strategies that establish a clear separation of concerns in software models. Large, weakly modularized models are hard to comprehend and to analyse. A further maintainance obstacle is introduced by conflicting changes of the model. In our recent work, we propose a structured process for distributed modeling based on a variety of distributed modeling activities. To allow modularity and to facilitate developer independence, we focus on the problem of splitting a large monolithic model into sub-models. The modeler is assisted in incrementally discovering the set of desired sub-models. Our approach is supported by an automated tool that performs model splitting using information retrieval and model crawling techniques. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a set of real-life case studies, involving UML class models and meta-models being based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework.