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

An empirical study of design strategies and knowledge used in object-oriented (OO) software design was conducted. Eight professional programmers experienced with procedural programming languages and either experienced or not experienced in OO programming (OOP) participated in this experiment. The programmers were asked to design a program for a procedural problem and a declarative problem. Analysis was concentrated on the design strategies related to two central aspects of the OO paradigm: (a) associating actions (i.e., execution steps) of a complex plan to different objects and revising a complex plan and (b) defining simple plans at different levels in the class hierarchy. Regarding the development of complex-plan elements attached to different objects, the present results show that, for beginners in OOP, the description of objects and the description of actions are not always integrated in an early design phase, particularly for a declarative problem; for the programmers experienced.