Contracting and Proving Classes with Models

Functional specification and verification often requires specialized mathematicians to do the work. Software development and proving correctness are regarded as separate activities. We want developers to do the specification and verification. One of the promising approaches for letting developers create specifications is the “Design by Contract” methodology [7] as present in the Eiffel language [8]. Contracts document the developer’s intend during an early phase of development and make assumptions on the existing system explicit. They establish a functional specification without leaving the notation of the programming language. The goal of this thesis is to integrate formal methods and Design by Contract into a common proof technology that does not require developers to learn a new notation and at the same time improves the quality of the software by using fully automated proofs. We try to achieve this goal by reducing the conceptual gap between Eiffel and the prover through the use of models and model-based contracts.