Automata-based software engineering is intended to development of simple, reliable, and efficient programs for reactive systems. An automata-based program implements the finite state machine in the form of the hypergraph of control states. A production rule language used to declare the use case requirements is proposed as the specification language for automata-based programs. Methods of program development are presented as the collection of golden rules defining true balance of integration of automata-based, predicate, and object-oriented programming. Methods are illustrated on the example programs.