Inheritance or composition: Rely on “is-a” and “has-a”?

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No – “is a” does not always lead to inheritence. A well cited example is the relationship between a square and a rectangle. A square is a rectangle, but it will be bad to design code that inherits a Square class off a Rectangle class.

My suggestion is to enhance your “is a / has a” heuristic with the Liskov Substitution Principle. To check whether an inheritence relationship complies with the Liskov Substitution Principle, ask whether clients of a base class can operate on the sub class without knowing that it is operating on a sub class. Of course, all the properties of the sub class must be preserved.

In the square / rectangle example, we must ask whether a client of rectangle can operate on a square without knowing that it is a square. All that the client must know is that it is operating on a rectangle. The following function demonstrates a client that assumes that setting the width of a rectangle leaves the height unchanged. 

void g(Rectangle& r)
{
    r.SetWidth(5);
    r.SetHeight(4);
    assert(r.GetWidth() * r.GetHeight()) == 20);
}

This assumption is true for a rectangle, but not for a square. So the function cannot operate on a square and therefore the inheritence relationship violates the Liskov Substitution principle.

Other examples

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