| Regulating Software Development Process by Formal Contracts (2007) | |||||||||||||||
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| While the notion of formal contract regulating the behavior of software agents is accepted, the concept of contract regulating the activities of software developers is quite vague. In general there is not documented contract establishing obligations and benefits of members of the development team. However, a disciplined software development methodology should encourage the use of formal contracts between developers. We propose to apply the notion of formal contract to the object-oriented software development process itself. That is to say, the software development process can be seen as involving a number of agents (the development team and the software artifacts) carrying out actions with the goal of building a software system that meets the user requirements. In this way, contracts can be used to reason about correctness of the development process, and comparing the capabilities of various groupings of agents (coalitions) in order to accomplish a particular contract. | |||||||||||||||
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