Object Focused Environments as Vehicles for Object-Oriented Modeling

Abstract. Object-oriented programming (OOP) languages promote rea-soning that revolves around objects that send each other messages to collaborate to solve a problem. To practically make this happen, devel-opers write programs, aided by integrated development environments (IDEs).We claim that IDEs may be an impediment for programming, because they treat program elements as text, which may be counterpro-ductive for manipulating dynamic content such as a model of collaborating objects. In our work we investigate the usage of an alternative metaphor for building development environments for (pure) OOP languages. We settled on the object focused metaphor, which allows developers to write programs by creating and manipulating intuitive depictions of object-oriented constructs. We built a prototype called Gaucho, which embodies our ideas. We conducted a preliminary controlled experiment comparing Gaucho against a traditional IDE in the context of program comprehen-sion. Our preliminary results suggest that alternative –visual – IDEs ma