I recently finished reading Design by Contract by Example by Richard Mitchell and Jim McKim. The book, as its title suggests, gives advice about writing good contracts through a set of principles applied in various examples. In addition to wanting to learn more about design by contract generally, I came to this book with a couple questions: Can you do design by contract effectively without built-in language support, and what is the relationship between design by contract and unit testing? In this article I’ll talk about design by contract generally, and discuss those two questions in follow-on articles. Read the rest of this entry »