Meeting in London between Alfonso Fuggetta and RENOIR members at UCL and IC
14-16 December 1998
The meeting has been motivated by the need to exchange information on ongoing research activities at Politecnico di Milano, UCL, and IC. The final goal of the meeting was to identify new directions of cooperation among the three groups.
During the visit there have been several discussions between me and Anthony Finkelstein, Wolfgang Emmerich, Jeff Kramer, and Jeff Magee. In particular, there have been presentations of two projects carried out at UCL and Politecnico di Milano that might be jointly developed and exploited.
The UCL project aims at developing a complete method and related toolkit to analyse and manage inconsistencies in UML specifications. The approach is based on a fine-grain description of UML constructs and their interrelationships. This makes it possible to trace all the changes to a specification and maintain a detailed description of inconsistencies. The project at Politecnico di Milano has a quite complementary approach since it tries to describe and manage documents and interdocument semantics without, however, considering the internal structure of documents. The two approaches might be fruitfully merged to produce a comprehensive and integrated document management system for software development processes.
As a side effect of the visit, it has also been decided to hold a working meeting in Milano in April to discuss the relationship between Requirement Engineering, Software Architecture, and ADLs.