Empirical Studies of Object-Oriented Artifacts, Methods, and Processes: State of the Art and Future Directions

Object-Oriented technologies are becoming pervasive in many software development organizations. However, many methods, processes, tools, or notations are being used without thorough evaluation. Empirical studies aim at investigating the performance of such technologies and the quality of the resulting object-oriented (OO) software products. In other words, the goal is to provide a scientific foundation to the engineering of OO software. This paper summarizes the results of a working group at the Empirical Studies of Software Development and Evolution (ESSDE) workshop in Los Angeles in May 1999. The authors of this paper took part in the working group and have all been involved with various aspects of empirical studies of OO software development. We therefore hope to achieve a good coverage of the current state of the art. We provide an overview of the existing research and results, future research directions, and important issues regarding the methodology of conducting empirical studies. In Section 2, we cover existing empirical studies and we relate them to the claims usually associated with OO development technologies. Section 3 describes in depth what we believe are important directions for research and, more concretely, precise research questions. Section 4 identifies what we think are important methodological points and strategies to answer these questions.