Supervisory systems allied to embedded software, a common subject in the literature, are responsible by the supervision of equipments like industrial machines, household-electric devices, cellular phones and PDAs. Many of them have severe requisites of fault tolerance and reliability as well as real time systems features. This research investigates the use of state-of-the-art technologies such as Design By Contract, Mock Objects, software agents and components in the development of real-time monitoring and data-acquisition systems. Recovery oriented systems concepts are also explored. The case study carried out to the research is a pipeline inspection software system, which uses such technologies. In a nutshell, it can be said that this case study showed strong evidence that the use of these technologies allowed the development in a very short time, without any loss of robustness, fault tolerance and reliability. The developed system is currently being used in real pipeline inspections.