Tolerating inconsistency [software development]

The author presents a simple technique for creating a formalism that allows development environments and other software systems to tolerate and manage their inconsistencies. It softens constraints without introducing special cases by treating violations as temporary exceptions which will eventually be corrected. Until then the offending (i.e., inconsistent) data are automatically marked by guards to identify it to code segments that can help resolve the inconsistency-normally by notifying and involving human agents-and to screen such inconsistent data from other code segments that are sensitive to the violation. The formalism which performs the above operations is described