Are Practitioners Writing Contracts?

For decades now, modular design methodologies have helped software engineers cope with the size and complexity of modern-day industrial applications. To be truly effective though, it is essential that module interfaces be rigorously specified. Design by Contract (DBC) is an increasingly popular method of interface specification for object-oriented systems. Many researchers are actively adding support for DBC to various languages such as Ada, Java and C#. Are these research efforts justified? Does having support for DBC mean that developers will make use of it? We present the results of an empirical study measuring the proportion of assertion statements used in Eiffel contracts. The study results indicate that programmers using Eiffel (the only active language with built-in support for DBC) tend to write assertions in a proportion that is higher than for other languages.

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