Incremental maintenance of software artifacts

We have built a software development tool, CLIME, that uses constraints implemented as database queries to ensure the consistency of the different artifacts of software development. This approach makes the environment responsible for detecting inconsistencies between software design, specifications, documentation, source code, and test cases without requiring any of these to be a primary representation. The tool works incrementally as the software is written and evolves without imposing a particular methodology or process. It includes a front end that lets the user explore and fix current inconsistencies. This paper describes the techniques underlying the tool, concentrating on the user interface and the incremental maintenance of constraints between these artifacts.