Interface control and incremental development in the PIC environment

The PIC environment is designed to provide support for interface control that facilitates incremental development of a software system. Interface control, the description and analysis of relationships among system components, is important from the earliest stages of the software development process right through to the implementation and maintenance stages. Incremental development, wherein a software system is produced through a sequence of relatively small steps and progress may be rigorously and thoroughly assessed after each step, must be accommodated by any realistic model of the software development process. This paper focuses on the analysis component of the PIC environment and demonstrates how it contributes to precise interface control capabilities while supporting an incremental software development process.