Lightweight consistency checking for advancing continuous model-based development in industry

Abstract: For the development of modern software-intensive systems, a large number of development artefacts are created and maintained to design and implement their intended structure and behaviour.Inconsistencies between these development artefacts occur continuously throughout the system's development and maintenance, simply due to the incremental nature of the development of artefacts.However, when not known and never resolved, such inconsistencies may ultimately cause failures in developed systems.Therefore, consistency checking across development artefacts is often desirable.The potential informality and incompleteness of models and other development artefacts, in combination with a need for shorter development iterations, presents challenges to consistency checking approaches.In this thesis, we consider model-based development settings in which short development cycles are aspired.We show a tight coupling between introducing short development cycles and the need for increased support for consistency checking across models and other artefacts.In particular, we identify the need for lightweight consistency checking approaches, which we break down into four required aspects.This thesis supplements the literature on consistency checking by providing industrial perspectives in the following two ways.First, we survey industrial settings and present the various needs for consistency checking based on a broad range of settings and scenarios. Moreover, we use these industrial settings to define what aspects a consistency checking approach should be lightweight to enable its industrial adoption.Second, we include detailed experiences of introducing lightweight consistency checks in industrial settings.In summary, this thesis presents contributions to consistency management in complex industrial settings to facilitate the adoption of continuous model-based development.