Embodiments described herein provide a round-trip engineering system. During operation, the system can maintain an intermediate system representation (ISR) for a set of artifacts of a piece of software. The set of artifacts can include a piece of code and a development model. The ISR can remain persistent upon synchronization of the set of artifacts. The system can incorporate, in a respective component of the ISR, a reference to a code block in the piece of code and a corresponding element in the development model. If the system determines a first update in a first segment of a first artifact of the set of artifacts, the system can identify a second segment in a second artifact from the set of artifacts based on a corresponding component in the ISR. The system can then propagate a second update to the second segment to reflect the first update in the first segment.