Integrating Components, Contracts, and Reasoning in CS Curricula with RESOLVE: Experiences at Multiple Institutions

Analytical reasoning is central to code correctness, and every computer science curriculum aims to teach students how to achieve this objective in one form or another. With the acceptance of object-based computing and component-based software engineering, the need for analytical reasoning that is based on formal contracts to establish correctness of software across module boundaries has become ever more obvious. Yet there are few institutions that have integrated modular, analytical reasoning principles into their undergraduate curriculum. Among many reasons for this shortcoming are: the effort it takes overloaded faculty to integrate new ideas of any kind in their courses, the challenge of institutionalizing ideas within a specific context, and constraints of a particular college. This paper presents our experiences over nearly two decades at five different institutions with the hope that they will serve as useful curriculum examples for like-minded educators at other institutions.