Relating hierarchy design back to their predecessors

In the development of medium to large software projects the design of the system experiences several revisions. This paper presents a method to relate a design back to an earlier version by mapping the various components of the design. Each component of a hierarchy design presents a different type and amount of information that can be used in the mappings. The `effectiveness´ of a component´s information is reflected in a partial ordering of the sets of relationships established between the versions of a design. A relationship that contains fewer combinations of mappings is stronger than a relationship with many different mapping possibilities. The goal is to obtain a relationship that consists of only one mapping from each module in a design to its corresponding module in a previous version