A Framework for Maintaining Artefact Consistency during Software Development

A software system is composed of a variety of artefacts, which are products of the various activities involved in the development process. In practice, software artefacts evolve at different paces and modifications applied to one artefact may not necessarily get reflected in other related artefacts. This differential evolution of software artefacts may result in synchronisation issues and inconsistency among artefacts. Outdated artefacts also constitute impediments to effective system maintenance and evolution. Although incremental development provides a more flexible solution for handling changes [Larman 2001], artefact consistency is often neglected: different representations of software go through stages of refinement without considering all the dependent artefacts as the process does not enforce artefact links.