A comparative study of programmer-written and automatically inferred contracts

Where do contracts — specification elements embedded in executable code — come from? To produce them, should we rely on the programmers, on automatic tools, or some combination? Recent work, in particular the Daikon system, has shown that it is possible to infer some contracts automatically from program executions. The main incentive has been an assumption that most programmers are reluctant to invent the contracts themselves. The experience of contract-supporting languages, notably Eiffel, disproves that assumption: programmers will include contracts if given the right tools. That experience also shows, however, that the resulting contracts are generally partial and occasionally incorrect. Contract inference tools provide the opportunity for studying objectively the quality of programmer-written contracts, and for assessing the respective roles of humans and tools. Working on 25 classes taken from different sources such as widely-used standard libraries and code written by stude...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ISSTA
• Authors: Nadia Polikarpova, Ilinca Ciupa, Bertrand Meyer
• Keywords: Contract Inference Tool, Contracts, ISSTA 2009, Programmer-written Contracts, Software Engineering