Practical investigation into the maintainability of object-oriented systems for mission critical business

  • Authors:

  • Joa Sang Lim;Seung Ryul Jeong;Min Cheol Whang;Yongjoo Cho

  • Affiliations:

  • Division of Media Technology, Sangmyung University, Seoul, Korea;The Graduate School of Business IT, Kookmin University, Seoul, Korea;Division of Media Technology, Sangmyung University, Seoul, Korea;Division of Media Technology, Sangmyung University, Seoul, Korea

  • Venue:
  • ADVIS'04 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Advances in Information Systems
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Empirical evidence on the maintainability of object-oriented systems is far from conclusive, partly due to lack of representativeness of the subjects and systems used in the study. This research empirically examined this issue for the systems that are mission-critical, currently operational and maintained by professionals. It was found that the OO group appeared to consume less time while maintaining more amount of software artifacts than the NOO counterpart. This economical utilization of time appeared evident regardless of software development life cycle. This was due to the usefulness of UML for impact analysis which contributed to effective comprehension and communication. Insufficient design specifications led to ambiguity and costly defects in transferring design solutions to development. Also the encapsulation of OO seemed to reduce mental loads at maintenance tasks and improved code reuse. However, the number of files to manage increased and thus, dependency management is required for the OO systems.