A new approach to consistency control in software engineering

Quality assurance methods as suggested by standards like ISO 9000 focus on the principle of review and feedback loops, which may be implemented by computer-based software process management including life cycle models, version control, and change tracking. Provided that the software process is modelled independently of concrete design methods, development tools, and software representations, a general representation of quality assurance methods can be obtained. In our paper we introduce such a high-level formalism, heavily exploiting some remarkable analogy between the software development process and distributed computations. Our approach is based on labelling each software element and product version during development. By using these labels one can coordinate versions, variant designs, and reconstruct elements of old versions automatically. Though our model is independent of particular design methods or programming formalisms, it can be parameterized with tools and compilers in order to be tailored to specific projects. Some applications are demonstrated for important problems of software project management that cannot be solved or even detected with nowadays standard methods, but that can easily be dealt with by using our new model.