The Role of Compliance and Conformance in Software Engineering

One of the most fundamental aspects of software engineering is the ability of software artifacts, namely programs, to interact and to produce applications that are more complex. This is known as interoperability, but, in most cases, it is dealt with at the syntactic level only. This chapter analyzes the interoperability problem from the point of view of abstract software artifacts and proposes a multidimensional framework that not only structures the description of these artifacts but also provides insight into the details of the interaction between them. The framework has four dimensions (lifecycle, concreteness level, concerns, and version). To support and characterize the interaction between artifacts, this chapter uses the concepts of compliance and conformance, which can establish partial interoperability between the artifacts. This reduces coupling while still allowing the required interoperability, which increases adaptability and changeability according to metrics that are proposed and contributes to a sustainable interoperability.