Abstract
This paper presents an experimental evaluation carried out in an academic environment. The goal of the experiment was to compare how different methods of documenting semantic information affect software reuse. More specifically, the goal was to measure if there were any differences between the methods with regard to the time needed to implement changes to existing software. Four methods of documentation were used; executable contracts, non-executable contracts, Javadoc-style documentation and sequence diagrams. The results indicate that executable contracts demanded more time than the other three methods and that sequence diagrams and Javadoc demanded the least time.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Meyer, B.: Object Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edn. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1997)
Blom, M., Nordby, E.J., Brunstrom, A.: An experimental evaluation of programming by contract. In: Proceedings of the Ninth Annual IEEE International Conference and Workshop on the Engineering of Computer-Based Systems, Lund, Sweden (2002)
Gosling, J., Joy, B., Steele, G.: Java Language Specification. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1996)
Jacobson, I., Booch, G., Rumbaugh, J.: The Unified Software Development Process. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1999)
Findler, R.B., Felleisen, M.: Contract soundness for object-oriented languages. In: Proceedings of OOPSLA 2001, Tampa, Florida, USA, pp. 1–15 (2001)
Song, I.-Y.: Developing sequence diagrams in uml. In: Kunii, H.S., Jajodia, S., Sølvberg, A. (eds.) ER 2001. LNCS, vol. 2224, pp. 368–382. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Kramer, R.: iContract - the Java Design by Contract Tool. In: Proceedings of the TOOLS 1998 Conference, Santa Barbara, USA (1998)
Cockburn, A.: Object-oriented analysis and design, part 2. C/C++ Users Journal (1998)
Box, G., Hunter, W., Hunter, J.: Statistics for Experimenters. John Wiley and sons, Chichester (1978)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Blom, M., Nordby, E.J., Brunstrom, A. (2008). An Experimental Evaluation of Documentation Methods and Reusability. In: Mei, H. (eds) High Confidence Software Reuse in Large Systems. ICSR 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5030. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68073-4_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68073-4_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68062-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68073-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)