Towards specialization of the contract-aware software development process

Abstract

The contract-based software implementation improves accuracy and verification capabilities of business information systems. This paper promotes contract identification in early phases of the software development and defining contracts within models. Design and implementation artifacts that are responsible for system functionality and system constraints are transformed during the consecutive development phases. Combination of the Model Driven Engineering paradigm and Design by Contract ideas constitutes the Contract Aware Software Development process (CASD). The approach is specialized for system modeling in UML, contracts specified at model level in Object Constraint Language (OCL), and the final implementation in the C# language. The specialized process is supported by the tool transforming the models with associated contracts into the corresponding programs with contracts at the code level. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.