What programmers do with inheritance in java

Authors:
Ewan Tempero;Hong Yul Yang;James Noble
Affiliations:
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Venue:
ECOOP'13 Proceedings of the 27th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
Year:
2013

Citing 20
Cited 1

Encapsulation and inheritance in object-oriented programming languages

OOPLSA '86 Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications
Genericity versus inheritance

OOPLSA '86 Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications
Keynote address - data abstraction and hierarchy

OOPSLA '87 Addendum to the proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications (Addendum)
Inheritance is not subtyping

POPL '90 Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Towards a metrics suite for object oriented design

OOPSLA '91 Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
A Validation of Object-Oriented Design Metrics as Quality Indicators

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
On the notion of inheritance

ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Experimental assessment of the effect of inheritance on the maintainability of object-oriented systems

Journal of Systems and Software - Special issue on Evaluation and assessment in software engineering
An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming

An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming
Software Metrics: A Rigorous and Practical Approach

Software Metrics: A Rigorous and Practical Approach
The many faces of inheritance: A taxonomy of taxonomy

Computer
A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Comprehensive Empirical Validation of Design Measures for Object-Oriented Systems

METRICS '98 Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Software Metrics
Micro patterns in Java code

OOPSLA '05 Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
Effective Java (2nd Edition) (The Java Series)

Effective Java (2nd Edition) (The Java Series)
How Do Java Programs Use Inheritance? An Empirical Study of Inheritance in Java Software

ECOOP '08 Proceedings of the 22nd European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
An empirical study of overriding in open source Java

ACSC '10 Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Australasian Conferenc on Computer Science - Volume 102
The Qualitas Corpus: A Curated Collection of Java Code for Empirical Studies

APSEC '10 Proceedings of the 2010 Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference
GoHotDraw: evaluating the Go programming language with design patterns

Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools
Automatic testing of sequential and concurrent substitutability

Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering

The power of interoperability: why objects are inevitable

Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming & software

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Inheritance is a distinguishing feature of object-oriented programming languages, but its application in practice remains poorly understood. Programmers employ inheritance for a number of different purposes: to provide subtyping, to reuse code, to allow subclasses to customise superclasses' behaviour, or just to categorise objects. We present an empirical study of 93 open-source Java software systems consisting over over 200,000 classes and interfaces, supplemented by longitudinal analyses of 43 versions of two systems. Our analysis finds inheritance is used for two main reasons: to support subtyping and to permit what we call external code reuse. This is the first empirical study to indicate what programmers do with inheritance.