Untangling the Timeline: Challenges and Opportunities in Supporting Version Control in Modern Computer-Aided Design

Paper Title

Untangling the Timeline: Challenges and Opportunities in Supporting Version Control in Modern Computer-Aided Design

Publication Info

• Topic area: Version control challenges and opportunities in mechanical CAD systems.
• Keywords: Version control, CAD, collaboration, socio-technical systems, design workflows, version history, branching, merging, interoperability, infrastructure.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing version control systems (VCS) in CAD platforms face significant limitations, including difficulty navigating version histories, managing interdependencies, and supporting cross-platform collaboration. These challenges hinder effective collaboration and design traceability.
• Significance: Version control is critical for managing complex, distributed, and iterative design processes in modern engineering. Addressing these challenges can improve collaboration, reduce errors, and streamline workflows in CAD-based product development.
• Motivation and related work: While VCS in software engineering is well-studied, CAD presents unique challenges due to geometric complexity, interdependencies, and proprietary formats. Prior research has focused on technical implementations or specific use cases, leaving a gap in understanding user-reported challenges across platforms.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A systematic review of user-reported challenges with version control in CAD, based on qualitative analysis of 170 forum threads from seven platforms.
• Novelty:
  1. Identification of four high-level categories of challenges: management, continuity, scope, and distribution of versions.
  2. Cross-platform comparison of functionalities in three major CAD systems: SolidWorks, Autodesk Fusion, and Onshape.
  3. Proposal of design opportunities to improve version control in CAD, focusing on articulation work, cross-boundary collaboration, and infrastructural reflexivity.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Data collection: Scraped 424 threads from seven forums using keywords like "version control" and "version history."
  • Qualitative coding: Open-coded 100 threads to develop a coding scheme, then applied it to the remaining threads.
  • Analysis: Identified user challenges and categorized them into thematic areas.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Key challenges include navigating cluttered version histories (47 threads), editing version histories (45 threads), identifying changes between versions (17 threads), and managing branching/merging (10 threads).
  • Issues with continuity include loss of version history during file export (19 threads) and manual propagation of changes to linked files (26 threads).
  • Scope-related challenges include coarse-grained versioning in Onshape (21 threads) and inability to delete obsolete parts in Autodesk Fusion (12 threads).
  • Distribution challenges include limited control over version-sharing permissions (7 threads).
• Advantage over baselines: Highlights gaps in current CAD VCS compared to software VCS like Git, providing actionable insights for improving CAD-specific workflows.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Data sources: Seven forums, including SolidWorks, Autodesk, Onshape, Thingiverse, and Reddit.
  • Metrics: Frequency and thematic analysis of user-reported challenges.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited focus on open-source platforms and third-party PLM solutions.
  • Need for qualitative methods like interviews to explore industry-specific practices.
  • Technical and economic constraints faced by CAD vendors were not deeply analyzed.

Summary

This paper systematically examines user-reported challenges in version control for mechanical CAD, identifying issues in managing, maintaining, and distributing version histories across platforms. It highlights gaps in current systems, such as difficulty navigating histories, lack of interoperability, and limited branching/merging capabilities. The findings inform design opportunities for better articulation work, cross-boundary collaboration, and reflexive infrastructures. These insights are valuable for CAD software providers and HCI researchers aiming to enhance collaborative design workflows.