An evolving web of software conjures up images of unmanagable chaos.  Gwydion
is designed to enable dynamic control of complexity through cooperating design
record analysis and architectural synthesis tools.

 -- Most evolutionary programming environments sacrifice
    architectural plans for unfettered change, making it easy to
    prototype and test ideas in small fragments.
 -- Most architectural design methodologies assemble and enforce planning
    of the big picture to assure coherence in a unified view.
These conflicting approaches are reconciled in Gwydion, where the customary
tension between top-down and buttom-up can be renegotiated at every level and
at any granularity.

The maintenence and enhancement of existing software can make it brittle when
the rippling consequences of change expose weaknesses in architecture and
modularization.  Hypercode is the tool for tracking the causes and
consequences of such weaknesses.  The web integrates documentation, design,
configuration management, tests and bug reports on top of version control to
capture the evolving program knowledge base.  Knowledge is the antidote to
chaos; it comprehensibly captures the full necessary complexity of the
application requirements and their implementation implications.

The benefits of Gwydion's dynamic cooperation between architecture and analyis
come from a synergism between the DYLAN language and the Gwydion hypercode
database.  In addition to relatively conventional tools to analyze the
consistency and completeness of the existing knowledge in the design record,
Gwydion emphasizes interactive tools for revising and enhancing the
large-scale organization of the system as it evolves due to changes in the
requirements and refinements in the implementation.  

"Distance" metrics are used to capture the utility of links in the web of
hypercode.  This in turn can be used to pare the graph of extraneous or
under-utilized clutter.  Clustering can be detected and interactively
formalized, leading to the synthesis of an architectural framework from
immature or incomplete pieces.  Gwydion provides a cooperative environment
which advises technical management, programmer teams, and individual
proframmers so that dynamic change can be effectively carried out at all
levels of architecture and prototyping.

The capability of the Gwydion environment to synthesize views from
customizable perspectives makes reuse of software easier because teams will be
able use perspectives which expose the consequences of assembling subwebs into
more complex structures.

Architecture does not come from nothing, and certainly will not come from
uncoordinated modifications to an already poorly organized system.  A complex
system can only be organized by a human effort to devise an organization that
captures the underlying order in the application domain.  There is no doubt
that maintaining the organization of evolving systems is harder than for
static systems, but to evolve or not to evolve is not a choice --- evolution
of software is a reality in any system connected to the outside world.

The only real question is what the best software development process is for
handling the inevitable changing in the environment and requirements that real
systems experience:
 -- Throw everything away and start over again, or
 -- Use a process and tools which are designed to control evolving systems.