Static consistency checking for distributed specifications

Abstract

Software engineers building a complex system make use of a number of informal and semi-formal notations. We describe a framework, xlinkit, for managing the consistency of development artifacts expressed in such notations. xlinkit supports distributed software engineering by providing a distribution-transparent language for expressing constraints between specifications. It specifies a semantics for those constraints that permits the generation of hyperlinks between inconsistent elements. We give a formal semantics for link generation, and show how we expressed the rules of the UML foundation/core modules in our language. We outline how we implemented xlinkit as a light-weight web service using open standard technology and present the results of an evaluation against several sizeable UML models provided by industrial partners.