Semantic Coherence in Software Engineering

During software engineering processes lots of artifacts are produced to document the development of a concrete software. For artifacts which are related with respect to their meaning for the development process, but which differ in their formal foundation, formal associations often do not exist or are not documented. This leads to gaps in the documentation of the software engineering process. The ideas behind the software are harder to understand and as a result consistent extension, modification and usage of the software become hard as well. In this paper a novel approach is presented to close gaps in the documentation of software engineering processes. Software development artifacts from various sources are integrated on a semi-formal level. In a first step artifacts with different formal foundation are classified according to their role in the current development situation. These classified artifacts, which will be called assets, share a common representation. Using this representation simple asset descriptions can be linked together in a second step. They become part of complex asset descriptions. The approach is semi-formal because the kinds of associations which can be defined within this asset representation can vary in their degree of formal foundation. Bridging documentation gaps using this approach improves traceability of development decisions, simplifies round trip engineering and enables new kinds of decision support for developers. Functions of common software development tools, e.g. suggestions for code completion, can be turned into a generalized support of “model completion” or “design completion” which will improve development productivity and documentation quality substantially.