April 9, 2002
Thank You Jim McKim!  
For our April 9th Meeting
James C. McKim, Jr., PhD
Interim Chair, Department of Engineering and Science
Rensselaer at Hartford
Design by Contract by Example
In this well attended meeting which included many former students, Dr. McKim discussed the book he co-authored titled, "Design by Contract, by Example," published by Addison-Wesley.  Design by contract is an underused --but powerful--aspect of the object-oriented software development environment. With roots in the Eiffel programming language, it has withstood the test of time, and found utility with other programming languages. By using both the Eiffel and Java languages as guidance, Design by Contract, by Example paves the way to learning this powerful concept.
Through six teaching principles, Jim McKim demonstrated how to write effective contracts and supporting guidelines. 
  • Separate queries from commands
  • Separate basic queries from derived queries
  • Write a postcondition for each derived query that specifies what result can be  returned
  • Write a postcondition for each command that specifies the value of every basic query
  • Decide on a suitable precondition for every query and command
  • Write invariants to define unchanging properties of objects.

Dr. McKim's talk inspired many pertinent questions on "real world" situations such as multi-threading environments and business domain application.

We gave away two full copies of ISE Eiffel Enterprise for Windows plus many copies of the evaluation CD for this product.  Courtesy Bertrand Meyer and Interactive Software Engineering.

We gave away two copies of Jim's book, as well as the other books shown below courtesy of  Addison Wesley.

      
      Textbook                    Textbook           Draft Manuscript          2 Copies