A controlled experiment on inheritance depth as a cost factor for code maintenance

Journal of Systems and Software

Volumn 65, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 115-126

  Prechelt, Lutz ^a,b   Unger, Barbara ^a   Philippsen, Michael ^a   Tichy, Walter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KARLSRUHE   (Germany)

^b NONE   (Germany)

Author keywords

Controlled experiment; Cost model; Inheritance depth; Maintenance

Indexed keywords

COMPUTER SIMULATION; COSTS; STATISTICAL METHODS;

INHERITANCE DEPTH;

OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING;

EID: 0038147022     PISSN: 01641212     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/S0164-1212(02)00053-5     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Basili V.R., Briand L., Melo W.L. A validation of object-oriented design metrics as quality indicators. IEEE Trans. Soft. Eng. 22(10):1996;751-761.
2. Cartwright M. An empirical view of inheritance. Inform Soft Technol. 40(4):1998;795-799. http://dec.bournemouth.ac.uk/ESERG.
3. Chidamber S.R., Kemerer C.F. A metrics suite for object oriented design. IEEE Trans. Soft. Eng. 20(6):1994;476-493.
4. Christensen L.B. Experimental Methodology. sixth ed. 1994;Allyn and Bacon, Need-ham Heights, MA.
5. Daly J., Brooks A., Miller J., Roper M., Wood M. Evaluating inheritance depth on the maintainability of object-oriented software. Empirical Soft. Eng. 1(2):1996;109-132.
6. Daly, J., 1996. Replication and a multi-method approach to empirical software engineering research. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.
7. Dvorak J. Conceptual entropy and its effect on class hierarchies. IEEE Comput. 27(6):1994;59-63.
8. Efron B., Tibshirani R. An introduction to the bootstrap. Monographs on statistics and applied probability 57. 1993;Chapman and Hall, New York, London.
9. Gamma E., Helm R., Johnson R., Vlissides J. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. 1995;Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
10. Harrison, R., Counsell, S., Nithi, R., 1999. Experimental assessment of the effect of inheritance on the maintainability of object-oriented systems. In: Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Empirical Assessment and Evaluation in Software Engineering, University of Keele, England.
11. Meyer B. Object-Oriented Software Construction. second ed. 1997;Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
12. Soloway E., Pinto J., Letovsky S., Littman D., Lampert R. Designing documentation to compensate for delocalized plans. Commun. ACM. 31(11):1988;1259-1267.
13. Sommerville I. Software Engineering. fourth ed. 1992;Addison-Wesley, Wokingham, England.
14. Unger, B., Prechelt, L., 1998. The impact of inheritance depth on maintenance tasks: detailed description and evaluation of two experiment replications. Technical Report 18/1998, Fakultät für Informatik, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany, July 1998.
15. Wilde N., Huitt R. Maintenance support for object-oriented programs. IEEE Trans. Soft. Eng. 18(12):1992;1038-1044.
16. Wilde N., Matthews P., Huitt R. Maintaining object-oriented software. IEEE Soft. 10(1):1993;75-80.