A Hybrid Approach to Maintain Consistency of Cooperative Software Development Activities

Maintaining consistency of objects produced during cooperative software development activities is an important issue in the development process field. We propose a solution based on a specific transaction protocol which mixes a non-semantic and a semantic part. The non-semantic part is devoted to the correction of interactions between activities and the semantic part is devoted to the individual correction of activities. The protocol allows software development activities, organised in a base/sub-base hierarchy, to cooperate by exchanging inconsistent results and forces them to compensate these inconsistencies. Consistency of results is considered regarding how they are produced (correction of interactions) and what is produced (correction of results). We use a non-semantic protocol based on an incremental syntactical analysis of the activities interactions for the first point and a semantic protocol based on a temporal logic for the second. The integration of both protocols allows to maintain the consistency of cooperative software develop-