Inconsistency-Tolerating Guidance for Software Engineering Processes

Software processes, together with software quality assurance, focus on ensuring and attesting that the engineering processes result in the appropriate software quality. Complex processes and regulations (e.g., in safety-critical systems), time pressure, or coordination needs, often cause engineers to deviate from prescribed processes, producing a cascade of inconsistencies whose repair is typically troublesome. Accordingly, guidance is needed to help engineers to fix the inconsistencies and understand the implications of postponing inconsistency resolution until engineers reach a consensual agreement of the most convenient repair. To this end, we bring together techniques and methods from process engineering, model inconsistency checking, and formal methods. Preliminary evaluations with real industry data have demonstrated the ability of our early prototype to track process inconsistencies across time and the potential for automated repair.