History
The term was coined by Bertrand Meyer in connection with his design of the Eiffel programming language and first described in various articles starting in 1986 and the two successive editions (1988, 1997) of his book Object-Oriented Software Construction. Eiffel Software applied for trademark registration for Design by Contract in December 2003, and it was granted in December 2004. The current owner of this trademark is Eiffel Software.
Design by contract has its roots in work on formal verification, formal specification and Hoare logic. The original contributions include:
- A clear metaphor to guide the design process
- The application to inheritance, in particular a formalism for redefinition and dynamic binding
- The application to exception handling
- The connection with automatic software documentation
Read more about this topic: Design By Contract
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