Monday, January 28, 2008

Challenges in building a design collaboration tool

The topic of our studio project is to create a much better collaboration tool enhancing the shared whiteboard concept to be more UML-aware. The UML part is relatively easy with the support from eclipse community. The whiteboard isn't.

Although there have been a whole zoo of shared whiteboard software, nobody likes them. We wish to create a better whiteboard so the designers/architects/programmers in Bosch across the world could communicate better.

The other part of the tool is to provide warning if a design change, expressed in UML, violates some rules set by the architects. It should be much more high level than the new OCL in UML, it must perform some kind of model checking.

I am not sure if it is the best topic one can get for a 16-month project, but I am happy to think about something that can help people to communicate better.

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