Contract-Based Programming for Future Computing with Ada 2012

Future advanced software engineering encounters some new quality evaluation criteria and related challenges on security as well as reliability of software systems. As the next generation of the world's premier programming language for engineering safe, secure and reliable software, the latest version of programming language Ada, Ada 2012, has introduced the concept of contract-based programming into its international standard. We should utilize contract-based with Ada 2012 to solve the new criteria and challenges in future advanced software engineering. On the other hand, since Contract-Based Programming (CBP) can strictly limit and assure the correctness of programs, we usually use precondition, postcondition of the subprograms to ensure to satisfy some requirements of parameters passing and/or returned values between two components. In many cases, we also use some contracts of types to ensure the correctness of building objects, such as type invariant, static predicate, and dynamic predicate. These conditions can improve quality of software, and therefore, we can utilize CBP to solve the challenges. Although CBP is important to future advanced software engineering, there is no report about how CBP can solve the criteria and challenges in future advanced software. Therefore, this paper investigates how CBP with Ada 2012 may solve the criteria and challenges in future advanced software engineering from seven areas, such as security, continuity, reactive-ability, predictability, anticipatable-ability, self-healing-ability, and autonomous-evolution-ability.