Commitment-Based Software Development
William Mark, Sherman Tyler, James McGuire and Jon Schlossberg
Information and Computing Sciences
Lockheed Palo Alto Research Labs
3251 Hanover St. O/96-01 B/254F
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1191
Abstract
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 modified. Comet has been applied to the domain of
sensor-based tracker software.
In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering , October, 1992.