Collaborative work with Software Models - Industrial experience and requirements

When the initial problems of introducing and adopting model-driven development in a company have been handled, we want to go to work. That means that we have to supply our team of developers with a development environment and tools and processes that allow them to work efficiently. In many cases the team would like to work with models as if it was “just another programming language” and use the same techniques and processes for team collaboration and coordination they are used to from traditional development. Unfortunately some of the traditional tools and processes that work so well for traditional development do not work at all for model-driven development. Version control functionality is usually a key part in coordinating the parallel work in a team and through a set of use cases, we arrive at a number of requirements to a model-driven development environment that must be available for a team of developers to work efficiently.