A large-scale empirical study of practitioners' use of object-oriented concepts
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1
How developers use the dynamic features of programming languages: the case of smalltalk
Proceedings of the 8th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
How (and why) developers use the dynamic features of programming languages: the case of smalltalk
Empirical Software Engineering
Hi-index | 0.00 |
The information hiding principle is generally accepted as one that if followed leads to higher quality software than if it is not followed. To follow the information hiding principle in object-oriented designs the advice is to avoid non-private fields. There is, however, little empirical evidence as to whether or not this advice is being followed. This paper presents the results of an empirical study of 100 open-source Java applications to determine to what degree non-private fields are declared, and to what extend they are used. The study indicates that it is not uncommon (albeit not that terribly common) to declare non-private fields, but then not take advantage of that access.