The .NET Contract Wizard: adding Design by Contract to languages other than Eiffel

Arnout, Karine; Simon, René

doi:10.1109/tools.2001.941655

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Besides the ones mentioned above there are numerous other runtime assertion checking facilities that have been developed. Here are some that are listed by Cheon [12] for programming languages, C++ [17], [30], [34], .NET [4], Python [29], Smalltalk [11] and Java [6], [21], [22], [14]. A comprehensive report on the history of runtime assertion checking can be found in Clarke and Rosenblum's IMPACT report [13].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Evaluation of Assertions as Oracles

Shrestha

Rutherford

2011

2011 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation

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In software testing, an oracle determines whether a test case passes or fails by comparing output from the program under test with the expected output. Since the identification of faults through testing requires that the bug is both exercised and the resulting failure is recognized, it follows that oracles are critical to the efficacy of the testing process. Despite this, there are few rigorous empirical studies of the impact of oracles on effectiveness. In this paper, we report the results of one such experiment in which we exercise seven core Java classes and two sample programs with branch-adequate, inputonly (i.e., no oracle) test suites and collect the failures observed by different oracles. For faults, we use synthetic bugs created by the muJava mutation testing tool. In this study we evaluate two oracles: (1) the implicit oracle (or "null oracle") provided by the runtime system, and (2) runtime assertions embedded in the implementation (by others) using the Java Modeling Language. The null oracle establishes a baseline measurement of the potential benefit of rigorous oracles, while the assertions represent a more rigorous approach that is sometimes used in practice. The results of our experiments are interesting. First, on a per-method basis, we observe that the null oracle catches less than 11% of the faults, leaving more than 89% uncaught. Second, we observe that the runtime assertions in our subjects are effective at catching about 53% of the faults not caught by null oracle. Finally, by analyzing the data using data mining techniques, we observe that simple, code-based metrics can be used to predict which methods are amenable to the use of assertion-based oracles with a high degree of accuracy.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Evaluation of Assertions as Oracles

Shrestha

Rutherford

2011

2011 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation

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“…For example, we reviewed five DBC tools for C#, including Spec# [5], the tool by Köhne et al [16], XC# [24], Contract Wizard [3], and Contract Sharp [14] and found that they can be put into the five categories of Fig. 1 XC# supports the specification of preconditions and postconditions with RequiresAttribute and EnsuresAttribute.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contract Specification in Java: Classification, Characterization, and a New Marker Method

Chen

Cheng

Hsieh

2008

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems

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SUMMARY Design by Contract (DBC), originated in the Eiffel programming language, is generally accepted as a practical method for building reliable software. Currently, however, few languages have built-in support for it. In recent years, several methods have been proposed to support DBC in Java. We compare eleven DBC tools for Java by analyzing their impact on the developer's programming activities, which are characterized by seven quality attributes identified in this paper. It is shown that each of the existing tools fails to achieve some of the quality attributes. This motivates us to develop ezContract, an open source DBC tool for Java that achieves all of the seven quality attributes. ezContract achieves streamlined integration with the working environment. Notably, standard Java language is used and advanced IDE features that work for standard Java programs can also work for the contract-enabled programs. Such features include incremental compilation, automatic refactoring, and code assist.

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“…15 It works by reading in a .NET assembly and listing all the types and methods from the assembly and allows for preconditions, postconditions and invariant checks to be entered as Eiffel expressions. These preconditions, postconditions and invariants are added to the Eiffel proxy class using Eiffel's language constructs.…”

Section: Summary Of Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Flexible Strategy for Embedding and Configuring Run-Time Contract Checks in .Net Components

Edwards

Haggard

2007

Int. J. Soft. Eng. Knowl. Eng.

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In component-based systems, there are several obstacles to using Design by Contract (DbC), particularly with respect to third-party components. Contracts are particularly valuable when debugging or testing composite software structures that include third-party components. However, existing approaches have critical weaknesses. First, existing approaches typically require a component's source code to be available if you wish to strip (or re-insert) checks. Second, documentation of the contract is either distributed separately from the component or embedded in the component's source code. Third, enabling and disabling specific kinds of checks on separate components from independent vendors can be a significant challenge. This paper describes an approach to representing contracts for .NET components using attributes. This contract information can be retrieved from the compiled component's metadata and used for many purposes. The paper also describes nContract, a tool that automatically generates run-time checks from embedded contracts. Such run-time checks can be generated and added to a system without requiring source code access or recompilation. Further, when checks for a given component are excluded, they impose no run-time overhead. Finally, a highly expressive, fine-grained mechanism for controlling user preferences about which specific checks are enabled or disabled is presented.

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The .NET Contract Wizard: adding Design by Contract to languages other than Eiffel

Cited by 14 publications

References 1 publication

An Empirical Evaluation of Assertions as Oracles

An Empirical Evaluation of Assertions as Oracles

Contract Specification in Java: Classification, Characterization, and a New Marker Method

A Flexible Strategy for Embedding and Configuring Run-Time Contract Checks in .Net Components

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