Industrial-scale software is commonly very large and complex, making it difficult and time-consuming to develop. In order to manage complexity in software, developers break systems into smaller components which can be developed independently.
Software contracts were first proposed several decades ago; they are used to explicitly specify the interfaces between software components to ensure that they work together correctly. Software contracts specify both the responsibility of a client using a service and of the component providing the service. The advantage of contracts is that they formalise what constitutes correct interactions between software components. In addition, they serve as documentation, as well as a basis for test cases, and help clarify correct use of inheritance. However, despite their usefulness, software contracts are still not widely used in mainstream software engineering.
In this work, we aim to develop a new software contract tool which we hope will help increase the use of software contracts. We start our work by evaluating existing software contract technologies and uncover a range of inconsistencies and shortcomings. We find that there are disagreements surrounding even some of the most basic aspects of software contracts. Using the lessons learned from our analysis of existing tools, we design a new contract tool, PACT. We describe in detail the formal semantics and typing of PACT and develop a first implementation of our tool. Finally, we discuss the advantages of PACT over existing tools, including its rigorous separation of interfaces and implementations, its rich inheritance semantics, and its support for flexible and expressive definition of contracts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/5339 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Voigt, Janina |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. Computer Science and Software Engineering |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Janina Voigt, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
| Relation | NZCU |
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