Design Strategies and Knowledge in Object-Oriented Programming: Effects of Experience

摘要

An empirical study was conducted to analyse design strategies and knowledgeused in object-oriented software design. Eight professional programmersexperienced with procedural programming languages and either experienced or notexperienced in object-oriented design strategies related to two central aspectsof the object-oriented paradigm: (1) associating actions, i.e., executionsteps, of a complex plan to different objects and revising a complex plan, and(2) defining simple plans at different levels in the class hierarchy. Asregards the development of complex plans elements attached to differentobjects, our results show that, for beginners in OOP, the description ofobjects and the description of actions are not always integrated in an earlydesign phase, particularly for the declarative problem whereas, for theprogrammers experienced in OOP, the description of objects and the descriptionof actions tend to be integrated in their first drafts of solutions whicheverthe problem type. The analysis of design strategies reveal the use of differentknowledge according to subjects' language experience: (1) schemas related toprocedural languages; actions are organized in an execution order, or (2)schemas related to object-oriented languages; actions and objects areintegrated, and actions are organised around objects.