“Lazy” consistency: a basis for cooperative software development

One of the major problems in cooperative software development is that of maintaining certain global consistency properties. Broadcasting changes that have already occured, as many programming environments do, will not resolve this problem. We argue in favor of an architecture where the announcements deal with impending or proposed changes as well as changes that have already occurred. One can then formulate consistency requirements on the system that are maintained “lazily” as it evolves. Such an architecture can support a wider range of cooperative processes than traditional software development environments. This paper describes the design and implementation of this architect ure.