Introduction to this special issue on empirical studies of object-oriented design

The academia and industry has accepted the object-oriented (OO) technology. With the acceptance of the technology, the need to understand the process and to evaluate the benefits of OO design became imperative. For the past years, the field of psychology of programming has been considering this task. The purpose of the present work is to reflect the shift from students to real programmers and from studies of individual programmers to the study of software development teams. This is demonstrated by considering the results of a laboratory and field studies of OO design.