Independent validation of specifications: a coordination headache

Large, complex projects face significant barriers to coordination and communication due to continuous, rapid changes during a project's lifecycle. Such changes must be tracked, analyzed, and reconciled to ensure high-quality in the end-product, otherwise problems may be get lost or ignored in the overall complexity. We report on “work-inprogress” in the study of coordination problems between two independent, separate groups: software development and software analysis. We have begun to construct a taxonomy of coordination problem, which we illustrate with two scenarios. We briefly describe current attempts to introduce incremental improvements to coordination problems in such projects via World-Wide-Web tools. Based on actual project experiences, we plan to deploy such tools in a non-intrusive fashion to improve coordination and communication between software