Collaboratively enhanced consistency checking in a cloud-based engineering environment

Software systems engineering involves many engineers, often from different engineering disciplines. Efficient collaboration among these engineers is a vital necessity. Tool support for such collaboration is often lacking, especially with regards to consistency between different engineering artifacts (e.g., between model and code or requirements and specifications). Current collaboration tools, such as version control systems, are not able to address these cross-artifact consistency concerns. The consequence is unnecessarily complex consistency maintenance during engineering. This paper explores consistent handling of engineering artifacts during collaborative engineering. This work presumes that all engineers collaborate using a joint, cloud-based engineering environment and engineering artifacts are continuously synchronized with this environment. The artifacts can be read and modified by both engineers and analysis mechanisms such as a consistency checker. The paper enumerates different consistency checking scenarios that arise during such collaboration.