Fine-grained and Structure-Oriented Document Integration Tools are Needed
for Development Processes

Stefan Gruner, Manfred Nagel, Andy Schürr

           Development processes of various engineering disciplines are
           usually rather complex. They consist of many interacting
           subprocesses which are carried out by different
           developers. Each subprocess delivers its own documents
           which are part of the overal result. All involved documents
           and their mutual, fine-grained dependencies are subject to
           permanent changes during their life-time in the development
           process. Keeping those documents in a consistent state is
           one of the most important prerequisites for the success
           of any engineering project. As completely automatic change
           control between document configurations is often impossible,
           interactive tools are necessary which we call integration
           tools. We report about experiences in building such tools
           and present an object-oriented and graph-grammar-based
           method for formal specification. It is also sketched how the
           tools' implementations can be derived from those high-level
           specifications.