A controlled experiment investigation of an object-oriented design heuristic for maintainability

Abstract The study presented in this paper is a controlled experiment, aiming at investigating the impact of a design heuristic, dealing with the `god class' problem, on the maintainability of object-oriented designs. In other words, we wish to better understand to what extent a specific design heuristic contributes to the quality of designs developed. The experiment has been conducted using undergraduate students as subjects, performing on two system designs using the Coad & Yourdon method. The results of this study provide evidence that the investigated design heuristic: (a) affects the evolution of design structures; and (b) considerably affects the way participants apply the inheritance mechanism.

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