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Consistency Checking


The SOMT method uses a number of models and notations and the checking of various aspects of the models is an important part of a development project. This checking can be formulated as a question of identifying "entities" or "concepts" in different models (or in one model), to identify some rules of how these entities should relate to each other, and finally to check that the models are consistent with respect to these rules. This type of checking is in this document called consistency checking. Three different types of consistency checking can be identified:

In some sense the checking of traceability aspects is a special case of the checking of the consistency between two models, but it is an important special case and it is given a special treatment in SOMT.

One general observation that can be made is that the identification of concepts/entities is very much depending on the particular notation used. Each separate notation will have to be treated separately following the particular rules that apply to this language. For formal languages like SDL, the concepts and procedures how to find the entities are well defined, while for other languages the rules are different, and for plain, informal text the entity identification will have to be explicitly done by the user. In SOMT there is a special possibility to "mark" words or phrases in text documents. The intention is that this marking means "this concept is important" or "this is a concept that I would like to for consistency checks".

In the rest of this volume, each activity of the SOMT method together with its associated models will be described in different chapters. Each of these chapters will also include a discussion on consistency rules that are relevant for this particular model.


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