On OO Design Consistency in Iterative Development

Abstract

In agile software development practices, the system evolves iteratively but does so in a manner consistent with its design rationale. Evolution often begins with last known design representation because it provides a high level view of the system that is easy to understand. However, the impact of a design change is poorly understood in terms of it's effect on consistency of design. In fact, design evolution presents three important issues: consistency amongst design representations, traceability of a design change in code in order to maintain consistency and versioning of design entities along with versioning of code. In this effort, we propose a solution to the first two issues using a relational meta-model of various design & code entities and an algorithm to check consistency over this relational meta-model