DESIGN BY CONTRACT: PRODUCING RELIABLE SOFTWARE

The construction of reliable software is one of the software engineering challenges. In this paper we present the main concepts of Design by Contract. The techniques of design by contracts affect all software development activities: from analysis to implementation: correction, software reuse, debugging, testing, documentation and management. Although the programming language Eiffel is the commercial language that at the moment has the native support for contracts, the ideas and concepts can be applied in different languages. (JAVA, C++, C#, etc.).