Long-duration transactions in software design projects

An example of a software development application is considered, and the formal model of H. Korth and G. Speegle (1988) is applied to show how this example could be represented as a set of database transactions. It is shown that, although the standard notion of correctness (serializability) is too strict, the notion of correctness in the Korth and Speegle model allows sufficient concurrency with acceptable overhead. An extrapolation is made from this example to draw some conclusions regarding the potential usefulness of a formal approach to the management of long-duration design transactions