Reconciliation: Managing Interference in Software Development
George Spanoudakis, Anthony Finkelstein · 1996
. This paper outlines a method, called reconciliation, for managing interference between partial specifications or viewpoints. The method supports the detection, verification and tracking of ontological overlaps. The paper describes the heuristics on which the method is based and illustrates the application of the method to a scenario. 1 INTRODUCTION The construction of a complex software system involves many agents (aka participants or actors). These agents have different perspectives or views of the artifact or system they are trying to describe or model. This gives rise to many partial specifications (or viewpoints) reflecting those perspectives [18, 21]. These specifications "interfere" with each other to the extent they refer to, or assert properties of common aspects of the system under development and its domain. This is a particular feature of the requirements engineering setting. Interference between specifications occurs at various levels. First, they might "ontologically ov...