Implementing Consistency Management Techniques for Conceptual Modeling
Raf Haesen, Monique Snoeck · Lirias · 2004
Most software development methodologies justify the use of multiple independent models to represent all aspects at the different stages in the development process. This can make the resulting information system inconsistent at different levels: inconsistencies can arise between different views of a single system, between documents at different development life cycle stages, or in a single document. The use of a single model and different views to that model can avoid this problem: all views have to be built according to well-formedness rules for that view and consistency between the related views must be checked. In this way it is possible to obtain a model that reaches a feasible level of validity and improved completeness. Validity means that all statements made by the model are correct and relevant to the problem, whereas completeness means that the model contains all the statements about the domain. This paper presents different techniques to maintain consistency of one view and the use of the same techniques to enforce and check consistency between the views. First we discuss the three strategies of consistency management: consistency by analysis, consistency by monitoring and consistency by construction. Finally we present a concrete implementation of these rules in a modeling tool, based on the object-oriented domain modeling method MERODE.