Evaluation of the contract-aware software development process in a controlled experiment

Abstract

Contract-Aware Software Development (CASD) process combines the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach with the Design by Contract ideas performed at the modeling level. Software engineering solutions need empirical investigation on the impact of methodology on the developed products. Therefore we have designed and performed a controlled experiment analyzing the crucial parts of the process. We focused on the CASD process specialized for UML models with contracts specified in the Object Constraint Language (OCL). Models with contracts are automatically transformed into C# code. In the experiment different development phases and their products were evaluated. As a result a high consistency between contract specification at a model and a code level was confirmed. The evidences stressed very high requirements on the tool support, and some inconveniences that still limit widespread application of the MDE paradigm.