Remembering the Future

Jörg W Mittag

If you want to know what Bertrand Meyer, the inventor of Design by Contract, thinks about combining TDD and DbC, there is a nice paper by his group, called Contract-Driven Design = Test-Driven Development - Writing Test Cases. The basic premise is that contracts provide an abstract representation of all possible cases, whereas test cases only test specific cases. Therefore, a suitable test harness can be automatically generated from the contracts.

Topics: TDD | CodeContracts

Elastic Modeling Languages

Declarative models are useful ways to drive complexity out of IT application design and configuration, in favor of more concise statements of intent. Given a declaration of preferences or constraints, an IT management system can compose multiple models together much more effectively than if the models were predominantly procedural, and also formally verify for conflicts or mistakes. On the other hand, not everything can be declarative; at some point, procedures are usually required to specify the “last mile” of provision, installation, or configuration. The Elastic Modeling Languages provide a balance between enabling users to express declarative, machine-reasonable policy, and procedural know-how for configuration or provisioning.

Topics: Modeling | DSL

What if you could backtrack (prolog) through a collection of processes (workflow) to evolve the state of a system (ets) where truth was replaced by satisfying the process contract pre-conditions and post-conditions (code contracts). A process is a function that transforms state from time t to t+1.

Topics: evolutionary | programing | workflow