Design by Contract

The work

AuthorsBertrand Meyer
Editors
Typeincollection
Year1991
Citekeymeyer1991design

Where it appeared

Published inAdvances in Object-Oriented Software Engineering
PublisherPrentice-Hall
Pages1--50

Related

Distinct fromabadi1997logic
Distinct fromgouw2015openjdks
Distinct fromhiep2022verifying
Distinct fromtatman2024analysis

Abstract

This chapter is a contribution to software reliability. It presents a view of software design based on a metaphor: software construction as a succession of documented contracting decisions. This idea provides insights into a number of issues faced by programmers whenever they try to construct correct and robust software. Two results of the approach developed in this paper are a coherent approach to the handling of failures and exceptions, believed to be both simpler and safer than earlier techniques, and a coherent interpretation of two important but potentially unsafe aspects of object-oriented programming: inheritance and dynamic binding. The discussion relies on the Eiffel object-oriented language and environment.

A copy is held

pdf, 2.5 MB. Not published — it may be under copyright. The facts and links here are.

How it got here

How it got hereimport via bibtex
Added2026-08-08 00:00 UTC
Approved bya person 2026-08-24 07:29 UTC

Cite it as

@incollection{meyer1991design,
  title        = {Design by Contract},
  author       = {Bertrand Meyer},
  year         = {1991},
  booktitle    = {Advances in Object-Oriented Software Engineering},
  publisher    = {Prentice-Hall},
  pages        = {1--50},
}

This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/meyer1991design/ and will keep doing so.