Tool Support for Contract and Scenario-Based Software Development

Currently, use cases (scenarios) and contracts play an increasing important role in software development. For scenarios this is mainly due to the fact that the application of UML and UML related process (e.g., the Rational Unified Process) leads to an augmented application of use cases and UML interaction diagrams throughout the software development cycle. Furthermore, contracts also have an increasing importance due to the integration of the Object Constraint Language (OCL) in the UML and due to the MDA-activities of the OMG. Currently, only tools exist that support the specification of scenarios but most of them do not support the entire software development cycle. For contracts the support available is restricted to editors, parsers and execution environments - a prototyping oriented approach is not supported by most toolsets available. We therefore developed a set of tools that support prototyping-oriented software development with scenarios and contracts. The developed toolset itself is implemented as prototype and laboratory experiments show the feasibility of the chosen approach.