Automated Consistency Checking for Multiperspective Software Specifications

Multiperspectives naturally arise out of co-operative work in applying appropriate technologies to construct different parts of an application. The representation styles of various perspectives can be highly heterogeneous and open-ended since those perspectives should be presented in a form appropriate to each participant in the software development process. This makes it difficult to provide consistency checking and integration mechanisms for the perspectives. This paper presents an approach of dealing with automated consistency checking for multiperspective software specifications regardless of their heterogeneity of representation. We apply expressive graph notations called Conceptual Graphs (CGs) as visual consistency checking notations. The combination of underlying logical reasoning and graph-based reasoning of CGs provide a powerful consistency checking mechanism. Our framework is illustrated with excerpts of a case study using Unified Modeling Language (UML).