An evolving web of software conjures up images of unmanagable
chaos.  Gwydion is designed to enable dynamic control of
complexity through cooperating analyis and architectural refinement
tools.  Most evolutionary programming environments sacrifice
architectural plans for unfettered change.  This makes 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.  This twain will meet 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. The rippling consequences of change can 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. Information is the opposite of chaos, it is the full complexity
of relationships necessary to capture the meaning of the program from
a full variety of perspectives.

The benefits of Gwydion's dynamic cooperation between architecture and
analyis descend from the DYLAN language and its object oriented
database. They are enhanced by both passive and active agents that
traverse the database graph. These can eliminate gratuitous complexity by
establishing "distance" metrics that capture the utility of links in
the web of hypercoded near to far subgraph caches. This in turn can
be used to pare the graph of extraneous or unutilized clutter.
Clustering can be detected, optionally enhanced or signalled to
enhance synthesis of an architectural framework from immature or
incomplete pieces. The cooperative nature of the Gwydion environment
is there to serve as an advisor to the programmer, the team of
programmers, and the manager of the team 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 a possible because
teams will be able use perspectives which expose the consequences of assembling
subwebs into more complex structures.