Interactions, Goals and Rules in a Collaborative Modelling Session

Collaborative modeling can enhance productivity and quality of modeling in system development and enterprise engineering projects by helping to construct agreement and a sense of model ownership among stakeholders/modelers. Most of these stakeholders have relatively low expertise in formal modeling; advanced modeler-oriented support for collaborative modeling is a possible remedy. As a basis for further development of such support (methods, tools), we have carried out a detailed exploratory study of the interaction between modelers, involving diverse aspects of modeling: goal setting, modeling language concepts, planning, etc. Central in our approach is the study of how collaborative modelers negotiate, set, use, and deal with the various rules/goals governing interactive modeling sessions. We describe the conceptual framework and approach used for our analysis, and present findings from a case study which focused on the first phases of a session concerning basic Business Process Modeling. We also compare our findings to some existing work, to demonstrate the relevance of our approach.