An Experimental Comparison of the Maintainability of Object-Orientedand Structured Design Documents

  • Authors:

  • Lionel C. Briand;Christian Bunse;John W. Daly;Christiane Differding

  • Affiliations:

  • Fraunhofer Institute (IESE), Kaiserslautern, Germany;Fraunhofer Institute (IESE), Kaiserslautern, Germany;Fraunhofer Institute (IESE), Kaiserslautern, Germany;Dept. Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Several important questions still need to be answeredregarding the maintainability of object-oriented design documents.This paper focuses on the following issues: are object-orienteddesign documents easier to understand and modify than structureddesign documents? Do they need to comply with quality guidelinessuch as the ones provided by Coad and Yourdon? What is the impactof such quality standards on the understandability and modifiabilityof design documents? Answers can be based on informed opinionor empirical evidence. Since software technology investmentsare substantial and contradictory opinions exist regarding designstrategies, performing empirical studies on these topics is arelevant research activity.This paper presentsa controlled experiment performed with computer science studentsas subjects. Results strongly suggest that quality guidelinesbased on Coad and Yourdon principles have a beneficial effecton the maintainability of object-oriented design documents. However,there is no strong evidence regarding the alleged higher maintainabilityof object-oriented design documents over structured design documents.Furthermore, results suggest that object-oriented design documentsare more sensitive to poor design practices, in part becausetheir cognitive complexity becomes increasingly unmanageable.However, because our ability to generalise these results is limited,they should be considered as preliminary, i.e., it is very likelythat they can only be generalised to programmers with littleobject-oriented training and programming experience. Such programmerscan, however, be commonly found on maintenance projects. As wellas additional research, external replications of this study arerequired to confirm the results and achieve confidence in thesefindings.