An experimental evaluation of quality guidelines on the maintainability of object-oriented design documents

Lionel C. Briand, Christian Bunse, John W. Daly

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

This paperpresents a controlled experimentfocusing on the impact of applying quality design principles such as the ones provided by Coad and Yourdon on the maintainability of object-oriented design documents. Results, which repeat thefindings of a previous study; strongly suggest that such design principles have a benejicial eflect on the maintainability of object-oriented design documents. It is argued that object-oriented design documents are sensitive to poor design practices because the cognitive complexity introduced becomes increasingly unmanageable. However; as our ability to generalise these results is limited, they should be considered as preliminaq\ i.e., it is very likely that they can only be generalised to programmers with little object-oriented training and programming experience. Such programmers can, however; be commonly found on maintenance projects. As well as additional research, external replications of this study are required to confirm the results and achieve conjdence in these findings.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPapers Presented at the 7th Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers, ESP 1997
EditorsJean Scholtz, Susan Wiedenbeck
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1-19
Number of pages19
ISBN (Electronic)0897919920, 9780897919920
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 1997
Externally publishedYes
Event7th Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers, ESP 1997 - Alexandria, United States
Duration: 24 Oct 1997 → …

Publication series

NamePapers Presented at the 7th Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers, ESP 1997

Conference

Conference7th Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers, ESP 1997
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAlexandria
Period24/10/97 → …

Keywords

  • Design documents
  • Experiment
  • Maintainability
  • Object-oriented
  • Replication

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