Pepper: A Case of Open Innovation with Sirius Web

Pepper is a new project management tool, developed through a collaboration between Obeo and CEA-List, one of three institutes of the CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) Technology Research Division. CEA-List brings together nearly 1,000 experts in smart digital systems working on R&D programs addressing the Factory of the Future, digital twins, artificial intelligence, and digital trust.

The development of this tool illustrates not only what’s possible with Sirius Web, a leading open-source framework for building web-based modeling tools, but also what’s achievable through Open Innovation.

From Internal Need to Open Source Contribution

CEA-List, through an internal project, needed to optimize its R&D project management tool. The goal: build a new ergonomic web application that empowers collaboration among its scientific and technical project managers through multiple views, such as forms and a Gantt chart, while ensuring that any change made in one view is automatically synchronized with the others thanks to the flexibility of model-based engineering.

To meet these requirements, CEA-List turned to Obeo with a clear ambition:

To encourage collaboration, make meetings more effective, and support knowledge sharing among experts;
Enable rich, semantic-based data visualization and interaction with a minimal footprint of specific source code to maintain;
Integrate seamlessly into CEA-List’s software environment.

The result of this joint effort is Pepper, a powerful and intuitive modeling application tailored to project management and collaborative work sessions.

Built with Sirius Web, Enriched by the Project

Pepper was more than just another Sirius Web application. Throughout the development, the project pushed the boundaries of Sirius Web itself. Several new representation types were built with a generic engine and customizable options to better support semantic data manipulation directly in the browser.

These contributions have been released fully as open source, with a clear distinction between two levels:

Generic features have been integrated into Sirius Web’s core, enriching the framework for developers building web-based modeling tools.
Project-specific elements, including the dedicated data model, configuration, and ready-to-use packaging, are available in Pepper on GitHub, directly usable by project managers.

This is the power of Open Innovation: co-creating tailor-made tools with our partners, while strengthening the shared open-source foundation for everyone.

What Pepper Models: Key Business Concepts

Pepper models the core elements of R&D project management. It goes far beyond task tracking by introducing a rich set of interrelated concepts to represent projects, deliverables, goals, risks, and collaboration structures.

Here are the main business entities handled in Pepper:

Project: The central object around which everything is organized. It represents a research or development initiative.
Work Package: Logical subdivisions within a project that group related activities and deliverables.
Task: Concrete action to be completed. Tasks are typically assigned to individuals and can be tracked over time.
Objective: The intended outcomes or goals of a project, which may be tied to tasks or deliverables.
Risk: Factor that could impact the success of a project, with the ability to monitor, document, and mitigate it.
Artifact: Output of the project (documents, models, prototypes, etc.) that can be linked to tasks or objectives.
Person: Individual participating in the project, as contributor, reviewer, or stakeholder.
Team: Group of persons working together and sharing responsibilities.
Organization: The structural entitiy (labs, departments, companies) that persons or teams belong to.
Stakeholder: Internal or external actor interested in or impacted by the project.

These entities are not isolated; Pepper enables semantic relationships between them (e.g., tasks linked to objectives, risks associated with work packages, artifacts produced by tasks).

Navigating Pepper: Main Views & Interactions

Pepper offers a set of tailored, interactive views to support various project activities, from long-term planning to daily task management. All views are rendered in your web browser.

Form View (on Project)

The Form View is used to consult and edit detailed information about a specific project. It includes structured fields for name, context, objectives, and key stakeholders, as well as dedicated tabs for sub-elements (work packages, tasks, risks, etc.).

In this form, some of the project data are presented with interactive tables whose content can be filtered, sorted and exported.

Gantt View (for Project or Workspace)

The Gantt View displays tasks and work packages over time. It supports scheduling, progress tracking, and visualizing dependencies.

OKR View (Objectives & Key Results)

This view is inspired by the Objectives and Key Results methodology. It provides a visual mapping between objectives, the tasks linked to them, and their completion status.

Daily View

The Daily View is optimized for short-term, operational management, or recurrent tasks. It allows team members to focus on what’s active "this week", what's "blocked", or what’s "ready". It’s designed to support team stand-ups and quick syncs.

Kanban View

The Kanban View presents tasks as cards organized in customizable columns (e.g., To Do / In Progress / Done). It’s intuitive, drag-and-drop-based, and ideal for agile workflows and tracking progress visually.

Value of a Model Driven core

One of the key strengths of Pepper lies in how little project-specific code was required compared to the large set of features it delivers. Many complex technical behaviors come “for free” to Pepper’s developers thanks to the modeling stack running under the hood.

No matter which view users choose to edit their data, all views stay automatically synchronized in real time. This capability required no extra effort on Pepper’s side, as it is natively supported by the underlying technology.

Moreover, the Pepper project does not need to handle database storage or even frontend generation manually. Both are automatically derived from the data model and Pepper’s configuration. In practice, Pepper’s developers can evolve the tool without writing a single SQL query or hand-coding web pages.

As a result, most of Pepper’s specific components simply focus on configuring the business data model and defining domain-specific views.

Ready to Be Extended

Because Pepper is fully model-driven, it can be easily extended to meet new use cases.

Need new task types, project metrics, or reporting views? You can evolve the metamodel and interface logic while relying on the Sirius Web framework.

You can get technical resources and contribute on GitHub:

To learn more about the Gantt, Deck, and Table representations in Sirius Web, you can also watch these two webinars presented by Stephane Bégaudeau:

As these views are generic and not strongly tied to a specific project management data model, they can be applied to other use cases. Who will be the first, for example, to use a Gantt view to represent data flows in embedded systems, or to use Deck to facilitate the categorization of system data? CEA-List has already started reusing several of them in other products, like the Table view to explore UML data inside the web version of Papyrus.

Join Us in Building the Next Modeling Tool

With Sirius Web, you’re not just using a tool, you’re joining a community that values modularity, adaptability, and openness.

At Obeo, we partner with forward-thinking organizations like CEA-List to develop domain-specific modeling tools through co-innovation. If your team is looking to design a custom modeling environment to meet your own needs, let’s build it together, and push the boundaries of what modeling tools can do.

Discover more about our Open Innovation approach.