Efficient detection of inconsistencies in a multi-developer engineering environment

Software developers work concurrently on different kinds of development artifacts such as requirements, architecture, design, or source code. To keep these development artifacts consistent, developers have a wide range of consistency checking approaches available. However, most existing consistency checkers work best in context of single tools and they are not well suited when development artifacts are distributed among different tools and are being modified concurrently by many developers. This paper presents a novel, cloud-based approach to consistency checking in a multi-developer/-tool engineering environment. It allows instant consistency checking even if developers and their tools are distributed and even if they do not have access to all artifacts. It does this by systematically reusing consistency checking knowledge to keep the memory/CPU cost of consistency checking to a small constant overhead per developer. The feasibility and scalability of our approach is demonstrated through an empirical validation with 22 partly industrial system models. A prototype implementation implementation is available through the DesignSpace Engineering Cloud.