Seamless Object-Oriented Requirements
This work addresses problems in software development for practitioners by improving the practical applicability of seamless development, though it appears incremental as it builds upon existing Design by Contract methods.
The paper tackles the limitations of Design by Contract in expressiveness, verifability, and reusability by introducing a novel approach called seamless object-oriented requirements, which builds on advanced program proving tools and includes a quantitative evaluation of its effectiveness.
Design by Contract enables seamless software development by unifying software requirements with their implementations. In its pure form, however, Design by Contract leaves some problems with contracts' expressiveness, verifiability, and reusability open. These problems significantly reduce practical applicability of seamless development. The present article introduces seamless object-oriented requirements - a novel approach to seamless development that builds upon Design by Contract and now-available advanced program proving tools. The article explains and illustrates the new approach, concluding with a quantitative evaluation of the extent to which the approach fixes the problems of traditional contracts.