Towards Web Collaborative Modelling for the User Requirements Notation Using Eclipse Che and Theia IDE

Abstract

Collaborative modelling has become a necessity when developing a complex system or in a team of modellers with a diverse set of expertise. Textual notations have a long history in software engineering because of their fast editing style, simple usage, and scalability. Therefore, we propose a novel collaborative modelling framework for the graphical User Requirements Notation (URN) which we call tColab. It uses the text-based TGRL (Textual Goal-oriented Requirement Language) to build URN goal models and then automatically generates corresponding graphical models. This framework is based on the architecture of Eclipse Che and Theia. On one side, Theia provides support for LSP (Language Server Protocol) so that textual models can be built and their corresponding graphical models can be generated in a browser IDE (Integrated Development Environment). On the other hand, Eclipse Che adds support for collaboration where multiple modellers can contribute to building the textual models in an online collaborative manner. This initiative aims to replace the jUCMNAV tool, which is the most comprehensive URN modelling tool to date but only supports a single user.