Java Glossary : design by contract

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design by contract: A programming technique most commonly used in Eiffel to pepper your code with assertions. These define a contract on each method -- the preconditions the caller must guarantee, and the postconditions the callee guarantees. Another form of assertion is called the invariant, something that must be true each time through a loop. Eiffel lets you talk about both the old and new values of variables in your assertions. In Eiffel, these conditions are a formal part of the language and may optionally be checked at run time. In Java there are various ways of kludging them including: iContract, jmsAssert, jContractor, Handshake, Jass and JPP.
Dr. Dobbs article on adding design by contract to Java ¤ Eiffel

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