Structured Interviews on the Object-Oriented Paradigm

The method of structured interviewing is an appropriate means of conducting a primary investigation when beginning a programme of research involving di erent empirical techniques because (i) interviewing experienced users from academia and industry should determine if academics are exploring issues that industrialists deem important, (ii) interviewing users from industry helps provide external validity, (iii) users of object-oriented systems have their own views on the bene ts and drawbacks of the paradigm. These opinions could then be used as evidence todecide whether an empirically unsupported practice is justi ed and warrants further, more controlled investigation, and (iv) these views can identify issues that have not been previously considered. Structured interviews, each based on a template of 23 questions, were carried out with 13 experienced object-oriented users to explore problems discussed inthe object-oriented literature concerned with high level system understanding, inheri-tance, software maintenance, and other issues. Interviews lasted between 30 min-utes and 2 hours. Analysis, undertaken by transcripting and summarizing each interview and tab-ulating subject's answers to each question, discovered opinions similar to those expressed in the literature. These include the steepness of the learning curve, the di culties of understanding created by inheritance, missing documentation, and inappropriate design, the tendency of systems to degrade as a consequence of soft-ware maintenance, and the view that C++ is inferior to purer OO languages