A survey of experiences amongst object-oriented practitioners

The object-oriented paradigm is becoming increasingly popular as a result of expert opinion and anecdotal ev-idence and not on the basis of sound empirical da ta. This questionnaire survey was undertaken as p a r t of a programme of research to validate unsupported claims about the paradigm. The questionnaire follows struc-tured interviews of experienced object-oriented devel-opers [7] with the intention to confirm the findings on a wider practitioner group. It was posted to relevant electronic newsgroups and t o members of an object-oriented (postal) mailing list. The survey received 167 responses t o the electronic questionnaire and 119 re-sponses (30 % response rate) t o the postal version. Results show that respondents are of the view that: (i) The object-oriented paradigm has advantages over other paradigms in terms of ease of analysis and de-sign, programmer productivity, software reuse, and ease of maintenance. (ii) Inheritance can introduce dificulties when trying t o understand object-oriented software. (iii) Missing design documentation and poor or inappropriate design are prevalent problems. (iv) Maintenance causes degradation of object-oriented software, but less frequently than conventional soj% ware. (v) C++ has many deficiencies in comparison to other purer object-oriented languages