Authors:
            
                    Omar Badreddin
                    
                        
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Timothy C. Lethbridge
                    
                        
                    
                     and
                
                    Andrew Forward
                    
                        
                    
                    
                
        
        
            Affiliation:
            
                    
                        
                    
                    University of Ottawa, Canada
                
        
        
        
        
        
             Keyword(s):
            Integrated Environments, UML, Modeling, Coding, Version Control, Model Merging and Versioning, Model Drive Development.
        
        
            
                Related
                    Ontology
                    Subjects/Areas/Topics:
                
                        Applications and Software Development
                    ; 
                        Domain-Specific Modeling and Domain-Specific Languages
                    ; 
                        Frameworks for Model-Driven Development
                    ; 
                        General-Purpose Modeling Languages and Standards
                    ; 
                        Languages, Tools and Architectures
                    ; 
                        Methodologies, Processes and Platforms
                    ; 
                        Model Transformation
                    ; 
                        Model-Driven Architecture
                    ; 
                        Model-Driven Project Management
                    ; 
                        Model-Driven Software Development
                    ; 
                        Models
                    ; 
                        Paradigm Trends
                    ; 
                        Software Engineering
                    
            
        
        
            
                Abstract: 
                Model Driven Architecture (MDA) advocates the use of models, rather than code, as the main development artifact. Yet model versioning and merging tools still lag in capabilities, ease of use and adoption relative to source code versioning and merging tools. This forces many teams to avoid model-based collaboration and concurrent model modifications. In this paper, we highlight the main challenges behind the relatively small adoption of model merging approaches. We present a novel model-based programming technology that addresses many of those challenges. The approach treats code and models uniformly, effectively enabling modelers to version and merge models using existing text-based technologies.