Commitment-Based Software Development

During the development of a system, software modules can be viewed in terms of their commitments: the constraints imposed by their own structure and behavior, and by their relationships with other modules (in terms of resource consumption, data requirements, etc.). The Comet system uses explicit representation and reasoning with commitments to aid the software design and development process { in particular, to lead software developers to make decisions that result in reuse. Developers can examine the commitments that must be met in order to include an existing module, and can explore how commitments change when modules are modi ed. Comet has been applied to the domain of sensor-based tracker software.