R. Plösch: The Role of Contracts and Scenarios in the Software Development Process, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing - SNPD 03, Lübeck, Germany, Association of Computer and Information Science (ACIS), pp 90-98, October 2003.


Software development processes play an important role to ensure timely delivery of software at high quality. Nowadays there is a tendency towards agile processes, like Scrum or XP. However, regardless of the type of process used in a project the same tasks always occur: analysis, design, implementation and testing. We believe that contracts and scenarios are good approaches to enhance the quality of software. We show where and to what extend scenarios and contracts can be used throughout the software development process and there-fore provide an overview how to apply these techniques in a software project.

The Role of Contracts and Scenarios in the Software Development Process