Independent validation of specifications: a coordination headache

Large, complex projects face significant barriers to coordination and communication due to continuous, rapid changes during a project´s lifecycle. Such changes must be tracked, analyzed, and reconciled to ensure high quality in the end product, otherwise problems may be get lost or ignored in the overall complexity. We report on “work in progress” in the study of coordination problems between two independent separate groups: software development and software analysis. We have begun to construct a taxonomy of coordination problem, which we illustrate with two scenarios. We briefly describe current attempts to introduce incremental improvements to coordination problems in such projects via World Wide Web tools. Based on actual project experiences, we plan to deploy such tools in a non intrusive fashion to improve coordination and communication between software development groups