To maintain a reliable software specification

To maintain a reliable software specification, i.e. keeping software specification and design document synchronized with its implementation is always a difficult task because of the time constraints on software developers. Under such pressure, software developers often view finishing implementation as the end of their duty and updating documentation as tedious, time consuming and without payoff. The paper presents a methodology and its accompanying tool set, Workflow-Implementation-Synchronization (WIS), for automatic synchronization of specification and implementation. The idea is to have the implementation and specification running in parallel during regression testing. Inconsistencies are discovered when the two versions generate different results. The inconsistency will lead to the automatic update of the specification documents. To illustrate this approach, the authors use software architecture description as an example of software specification document. They applied the WIS method to specific telecommunication control software. The experimental results show that WIS method is able to detect inconsistencies and synchronize the software architecture document with the software implementation. This line of research promises to reduce human involvement in keeping specification and implementation synchronized and thus improve the efficiency and reliability of software maintenance