Utilizing the Relationships Between Inconsistencies for more Effective Inconsistency Resolution

During software modeling, engineers are prone to making mistakes. State-of-the-art tool support can help detect these mistakes and point to inconsistencies in the model. They even can generate fixing actions for these inconsistencies. However state-of-the-art approaches process inconsistencies individually, assuming that each single inconsistency is a manifestation of an individual defect. This paper presents our vision of the next steps in inconsistency resolution. We believe that inconsistencies are merely expression of defects. That is, inconsistencies highlight situations under which defects are observable. However, a single defect in a software model may result in many inconsistencies and a single inconsistency may be the result of multiple defects. Inconsistencies may thus be related to other inconsistencies and we thus believe that during fixing, one should consider the clusters of such related inconsistencies. The main benefit of clustering inconsistencies is that it becomes easier to detect the defect the bigger the cluster. This paper discusses the idea in principle, provides some qualitative aspects of its benefit, and gives an outlook on how we plan to realize our vision.