Contract First

A number of people are championing Contract-First Development within SOA.

For example, Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight. In a number of recent blog postings on the topic, he reports a sympathetic hearing from Microsoft personnel (Bill Gibson, Simon Guest) and asserts support from Microsoft products (BizTalk Server). [August 27, 2004] [November 11, 2004] [November 11, 2004 (again)] [November 30, 2004]

But I am concerned that some people are basing Contract-First Development on a narrow notion of Service Contract - for example, equivalent to the signature of a service, expressed in WSDL. Sometimes people talk about Schema-First Development, which indicates a concern for semantics as well as syntax. But I don't think this goes far enough.

I previously expressed my preference for the term Design-by-Contract, since this term is strongly associated with a broader notion of Contract including preconditions and postconditions. Even traditional Design-by-Contract doesn't include some of the non-functional obligations expressed in a service contract, such as Service Level Agreements, Security Policy and Commercial Terms, which are essential for distributed computing and SOA. We have used the term Distributed Design-by-Contract to emphasise a broader concern for all these dimensions of a service contract.

Actually, I don't really mind which term we use, provided that we can assume the broadest meaning for the term Service Contract.