An experimental evaluation of quality guidelines on the maintainability of object-oriented design documents
Lionel Briand, Christian Bunse, John W. Daly · 1997
This paperpresents a controlled experimentfocusing on the impact of applying quality design principles such as the ones provided by Coad and Yourdon on the maintainability of object-oriented design documents.Results, which repeat thefindings of a previous study; strongly suggest that such design principles have a benejicial eflect on the maintainability of object-oriented design documents.It is argued that object-oriented design documents are sensitive to poor design practices because the cognitive complexity introduced becomes increasingly unmanageable.However; as our ability to generalise these results is limited, they should be considered as preliminaq\ i.e., it is very likely that they can only be generalised to programmers with little object-oriented training and programming experience.Such programmers can, however; be commonly found on maintenance projects.As well as additional research, external replications of this study are required to confirm the results and achieve conjdence in these findings. m INTRODUCTIONInterest in object-oriented techniques has been rising as more and more companies have switched to an object-oriented methodology for developing their software systems.Today, object-oriented analysis and design methods, languages, and development environments are visible in both small and large software organizations alike.This situation occurred mainly as a result of opinion and anecdotal evidence provided by vendors and experts; not really as a result of empirical evidence