Open AccessThe Impact of using a Contract-Driven, Test-Interceptor based Software Development Approach
Author(s) -
Justus Posthuma,
Fritz Solms,
Bruce W. Watson
Publication year - 2022
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Conference proceedings
DOI - 10.5121/csit.2022.120704
Subject(s) - software quality analyst , reusability , computer science , software quality assurance , component (thermodynamics) , quality assurance , process (computing) , quality (philosophy) , software quality , software engineering , software quality control , software development , software development process , software , reliability engineering , process management , engineering , operations management , operating system , philosophy , physics , thermodynamics , external quality assessment , epistemology
Contract Driven Development formalizes functional requirements within component contracts. The process aims to produce higher quality software, reduce quality assurance costs and improve reusability. However, the perceived complexity and cost of requirements formalization has limited the adoption of this approach in industry. In this article, we consider the extent to which the overheads of requirements formalization can be netted off against the reduced quality assurance costs arising from being able to autogenerate functional test interceptors from component contracts. Test-interceptors are used during testing to verify that component contracts are satisfied. In particular, we investigate the impact of contract-driven development on both the quality attributes of the software development process and the quality of the software produced by the process. Empirical data obtained from an actual software project using contract-driven development with test interceptor generation is compared to that obtained from similar projects that used a traditional software development process with informal requirements and manually written functional tests.