At Xcential, we typically describe ourselves as a legislative technology company. While that is correct, the true answer is more nuanced than that. We purposefully don’t solve problems that are mainstream and relatively easily solved by other off-the-shelf software. Instead, we say that we focus on drafting but, in saying that, we understate what we do. In practice, we focus on a very complex and high-value problem called change management — as it relates to legislation. Few people truly know how to solve this problem.

Twenty years ago, the founders of Xcential worked at an XML database company that was a subsidiary of Xerox. We started Xcential because we thought the legislation was one of the best applications for XML we had ever come across. It was the change management aspects that fascinated me, in particular. While my knowledge of legislation was based on high school civics class, I had a lot of experience in the field of change management.

At the start of my career, I was an electronics design engineer at the Boeing Company. While there, I worked on a very sophisticated form of change management — concurrent fault simulation of behavioral representations of electronic systems. Fault simulation is a deliciously complex differencing problem. In legislation, we think of changes as amendments to the text and we record them as insertions and deletions. In fault simulation, the changes aren’t textual, they are behavioral. We record those changes as observable differences from expected results in something called a fault dictionary. With this dictionary of simulated faults, you are able to backtrack to predict which likely faults are causing the problem.

While managing amendments and managing faults in an electronic system might seem a world apart, algorithmically they are surprising similar. In an amended bill, the objective is to efficiently record changes to a document as deltas (differences) recorded inline within the original text. When simulating an electronic system, the objective is to record thousands of potential failures as shadow circuits (differences) against a single good simulation executing concurrently. The shadow circuits, while a dynamic part of a simulation run, are very analogous to the changes recorded in a document. It’s a very clever techniques for efficiently simulating the behavior of thousands of things that might go without having to run thousands of individual simulations.

Getting my head around the complexities of concurrent fault simulation taught me how to think in a world of asynchronous recursion — electronic systems are inherently asynchronous. Complex recursion in legislative documents is something I must frequently wrestle with, from parsing and responding to complex requests for documents or parts of documents in the URL Resolver to managing the layers of sets of changes that exist in the U.S. Code as laws are amended.

Change management has a lot of applications — not just in managing faults in an electronic circuit or amendments in legislation. Another project at Boeing that I was not directly involved with involved allowing every airliner coming off the assembly line to have it’s own unique document configuration that would evolve through the thirty or so years the aircraft was in service. So many possibilities…