AI works well with Design by Contract

In this issue: a requirements plan that works; making AI-based code generation effective; progress in the Eiffel standard; approaching deadline for VERIFAI.

A checklist for requirements

In mentioning the new requirements book by Bruel, Ebersold and Naumcheva last week, I alluded to the “Standard Plan” in my Requirements Handbook. It is worth reproducing here since it has been shown time and again to serve as an important checklist of everything that a project should consider at requirements time. Here is a summary slide of the plan:

The approach considers four parts (the “PEGS”) and treats them as equally important: Goals (the business motivation for the project), Environment (the outside context in which the system will operate), System (the detailed specification of functionality) and Project (how we organize the effort). Full explanations can be found in the free-access Standard Plan chapter in the book page.

If you have not used the plan before, try it. It will almost surely reveal important questions about your project that you might otherwise miss until too late.

Making AI-based programming successful

As argued in previous issues of this newsletter and my “Probable to Provable” paper, the key to successful AI-based program development (“vibe coding”, although coding is not the full story!) is to provide guarantees of correctness. Otherwise, welcome to hallucinations.

Design by Contract may hold part of the solution. The full picture is not entirely clear yet but it seems attractive to generate both the code and the contracts with AI support. There has been a fascinating discussion over the past week on the Eiffel User Group, started by Larry Rix who in a few days produced a considerable amount of strongly-contracted library code, working hand in hand with Claude AI. It is work in progress with the current results available in a Github repository.

Also noteworthy is an impressive document and set of scripts prepared by Javier Velilla from Eiffel Software instructing LLMs to produce high-quality Eiffel code applying Design by Contract and the strong style guidelines associated with Eiffel. You can find it at its current location. It too will be evolving (and moved to a more standard place) but it already provides hugely useful resources.

Eiffel, contracts, quality guidelines and AI agents are a powerful combination. Expect more developments in the coming weeks and months.

Progress in the Eiffel standard

Eiffel is defined by an international standard, Ecma International standard 367, which is also an ISO (International Standards Organization), dating back to 2006 (the first edition was in 2005). The standard is available here. (You can also get it from the ISO site, for a fee, whereas the Ecma version is free.)

After a few years' respite (badly needed since the preparation of such an international standard is a considerable effort), work started again a few years later but it did not proceed very fast until last year. Now it is gearing up again. As a matter of fact much of the text is roughly ready but requires thorough verification. In particular, we set ambitious goals regarding the rigor of the description and the ease of reading; every specification is followed by “informative text”, and every reference to an official concept of the language is not only underlined (as in the previous editions) but actually a hyperlink. That may sound innocuous, but the result is a document with thousands of hyperlinks (I think at least 3000 of them at the moment), each of which has to be entered manually (after searching for the source of the reference). I must say that FrameMaker, still by far the best text-processing system available (in spite of Adobe's indefatigable efforts, for the past two decades,  to sabotage it), makes the process possible, but it is still very labor intensive.

Of some 40 chapters, or “subclauses” in Ecma terminology, 10 are in a close-to-final state, which is both encouraging and indicative of the work that remains. At this point a subclause gets released about every two weeks but we should be able to fasten the pace, so as to have a full version ready by mid-year for submission to Ecma a bit later.

The intermediate versions are not public but we may ask permission from Ecma to release a draft at some point. Most importantly, many organizations are members of Ecma; if yours is, please make sure that your representative is aware of the Eiffel effort. You can contact me for details.

Deadline approaching for VERIFAI submissions

Less than two weeks are left till the deadline for submitting proposals (which can be just abstracts) to the VERIFAI workshop on The Interplay Between Artificial Intelligence and Formal Verification (8-11 March 2026, near Toulouse in France). This even is on one of the hottest areas in software engineering today; if you have ideas on the topic, share them. The workshop page is at https://www.laser-foundation.org/verifai-26/.

Cover photo: Acrobat in Kanazawa, part of festivities at a Japanese wedding