Live and global consistency checking in a collaborative engineering environment

• Michael Alexander Tröls
• Atif Mashkoor
• Alexander Egyed

During software and systems engineering, engineers have to rely on different engineering tools in order to capture different kinds of artifacts, such as requirement specifications, design models or code. Even though the artifacts that engineers capture with these tools are interdependent, the tools have limited abilities to detect inconsistencies among them. Today no approach exists that is able to provide live inconsistency feedback of engineering artifacts --- captured and maintained in different engineering tools --- without disrupting the engineers' workflow. The work presented in this paper introduces a novel approach for live, multi-tool, consistency checking where engineers continue to use their respective tools and receive inconsistency feedback across their tools' artifacts in a live manner. The approach uses a cloud-based engineering platform to replicate the tool's artifacts and to detect inconsistencies there. Within the cloud, engineers may link these artifacts and define cross-tool consistency rules. The approach was validated through an empirical study and two industrial case studies to demonstrate usefulness, correctness and scalability.