Inconsistency Management for Multiple-View Software Development Environments

Developers need tool support to help manage the wide range of inconsistencies that occur during software development. Such tools need to provide developers with ways to define, detect, record, present, interact with, monitor and resolve complex inconsistencies between different views of software artefacts, different developers and different phases of software development. This paper describes our experience with building complex multiple-view software development tools that support diverse inconsistency management facilities. We describe software architectures we have developed, user interface techniques used in our multiple-view development tools, and discuss the effectiveness of our approaches compared to other architectural and HCI techniques.