Evaluation of Assertion Support for the Java Programming Language

There is some evidence, that assertion techniques, i.e., preconditions, postconditions and invariants have a positive effect on the overall software quality. Unfortunately only a limited number of commercially relevant programming languages support assertion techniques (e.g., Eiffel). Even modern programming languages like Java have very limited built-in support for assertions. Nevertheless a number of systems exist for the the Java programming language, that support assertion techniques in different ways (language extensions, preprocessors, metaprogramming approaches). In order to make these different approaches comparable we developed a set of criteria and used these criteria to evaluate these systems.