Configuration management by consensus: an application of law-governed systems
Naftaly H. Minsky, David Rozenshtein · 1990
It is self-evident that if one wants to model and control the cooperative process of software development, one must provide for cooperative decision making. In particular, one should be able to base the decision on whether and how to carry out a given operation on the consensus of several, possibly independent, agents. It is important to emphasize that this is not just a matter of computing the conjunction of some set of conditions. One must also provide a mechanism for establishing any desired consensus structure, which would specify who is allowed to state which kinds of concerns regarding this operation, and what the relationship among these concerns should be.