[...]... Object-oriented software development 1.1 INTRODUCTION What is the potential of the object-oriented paradigm? How much improvement of the software development process can we reasonably expect from using this technology, which 25 years after its initial invention finally seems to be conquering the software industry? Fred Brooks, in his well-known article “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents in Software Engineering ... OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT fail, the whole building may fall apart It is therefore even more important than before to find ways to guarantee software correctness Fortunately, in recent years a very promising method has been proposed to bring elements from the research fields of abstract data types and formal specification into standard use in software engineering This is the theory of software contracting... OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT production and use of tailorable software components, a profound change becomes possible Benefits of a reusability approach There are two reasons for optimism First, the cost of software can still be reduced by an order of magnitude by removing most of the accidental difficulties from industrial software engineering maybe not for a single system version, but surely over... concepts have proved sufficient to specify and implement most of the software we need, almost regardless of application area 1.4 SOFTWARE CONTRACTING Software designed for reuse needs to be of extra high quality, since its potential to increase productivity also brings the risk of causing much more harm than before Writing most of the software from scratch in traditional style at least has the advantage... have been worthwhile Scope of the book The book is intended for software professionals as well as for students at the graduate and undergraduate levels We believe it can be read by anyone who has acquired a general understanding of the problems of software engineering, and who has some inclination for abstract thinking The knowledgeable software engineer used to dealing with practical solutions may... Accidents in Software Engineering [Brooks 1987], divides the difficulties of building software into essence and accidents The essence of a piece of software is a construct of interlocking concepts: data sets, relationships among data items, algorithms, and function invocations This construct is the general architecture of the software that part of its logical structure which is independent of any particular... a change in the role and perception of software methods: in addition to their well-established use in the earliest stages of a project—requirements analysis and system specification— they are increasingly viewed as providing the intellectual support needed across the entire software construction process, through design and implementation to maintenance and reengineering The object-oriented approach... standard practice and finally give the term software engineering its intended meaning? In addition to the extreme flexibility provided by the class concept—allowing us to build open components that can be combined and tailored through inheritance—three crucial aspects of objectorientation already mentioned in the preface, seamlessness, reversibility, and software contracting, deserve much more attention... approach is the only method known to date that has the potential to turn analysis, design, and implementation of general software systems into a truly seamless process A smooth transition from user requirements over analysis and design into running systems has been the goal of software engineering for over 20 years, but traditional methods (although often claiming to have the solution) have generally failed... realm of analysis and design, so indirectly we owe our greatest debt to its designer Bertrand Meyer His systematic effort to introduce the powerful idea of software contracting to the systems development industry, and make it part of everyday software engineering, has served as our main source of inspiration We also thank him for valuable comments and discussions on draft versions of the book, and for . understanding of the problems of software engineering, and who has some inclination for abstract thinking. The knowledgeable software engineer used to dealing. introduce the powerful idea of software contracting to the systems development industry, and make it part of everyday software engineering, has served as our