Abstract
Inheritance is a crucial part of object-oriented programming, but its use in practice, and the resulting large-scale inheritance structures in programs, remain poorly understood. Previous studies of inheritance have been relatively small and have generally not considered issues such as Java’s distinction between classes and interfaces, nor have they considered the use of external libraries.
In this paper we present the first substantial empirical study of the large-scale use of inheritance in a contemporary OO programming language. We present a suite of structured metrics for quantifying inheritance in Java programs. We present the results of performing a corpus analysis using those metrics to over 90 applications consisting of over 100,000 separate classes and interfaces. Our analysis finds higher use of inheritance than anticipated, variation in the use of inheritance between interfaces and classes, and differences between inheritance within application types compared with inheritance from external libraries.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Taivalsaari, A.: On the notion of inheritance. Comp. Surv. 28(3), 438–479 (1996)
Meyer, B.: Reusability: the case for object-oriented design. IEEE Software, 50–64 (March 1987)
Snyder, A.: Inheritance and the development of encapsulated software components. In: Research Directions in Object Oriented Programming, pp. 165–188. MIT Press, Cambridge (1987)
Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., Vlissides, J.: Design Patterns. Addison Wesley Publishing Company, One Jacob Way, Reading, Massachusetts 01867 (1994)
Johnson, R.E., Foote, B.: Designing reusable classes. Journal of Object-Oriented Programming (June/July 1988)
Rumbaugh, J., Jacobson, I., Booch, G.: Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, 2nd edn. Addison-Wesley, Reading (2004)
Daly, J., Brooks, A., Miller, J., Roper, M., Wood, M.: Evaluating inheritance depth on the maintainability of object-oriented software. Empirical Software Engineering 1(2), 109–132 (1996)
Cartwright, M.: An empirical view of inheritance. Information and Software Technology 40, 795–799 (1998)
Harrison, R., Counsell, S., Nithi, R.: Experimental assessment of the effect of inheritance on the maintainability of object-oriented systems. Journal of Systems and Software 52, 173–179 (2000)
Chidamber, S.R., Kemerer, C.F.: Towards a metrics suite for object oriented design. In: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, pp. 197–211 (1991)
Chidamber, S.R., Kemerer, C.F.: A metrics suite for object oriented design. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 20(6), 476–493 (1994)
Manel, D., Havanas, W.: A study of the impact of C++ on software maintenance. In: International Conference on Software Maintenance, pp. 63–69 (1990)
Succi, G., Pedrycz, W., Djokic, S., Zuliani, P., Russo, B.: An empirical exploration of the distributions of the Chidamber and Kemerer object-oriented metrics suite. Empirical Softw. Engg. 10(1), 81–104 (2005)
Collberg, C., Myles, G., Stepp, M.: An empirical study of Java bytecode programs. Softw. Pract. Exper. 37(6), 581–641 (2007)
Chidamber, S., Darcy, D., Kemerer, C.: Managerial use of metrics for object-oriented software: an exploratory analysis. IEEE Trans. Software Engineering 24(8), 629–639 (1998)
Basili, V.R., Briand, L.C., Melo, W.L.: A validation of object-oriented design metrics as quality indicators. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 22(10), 751–761 (1996)
Briand, L.C., Daly, J., Porter, V., Wüst, J.K.: A comprehensive empirical validation of design measures for object-oriented systems. In: METRICS 1998: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Software Metrics, pp. 246–257. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1998)
Kitchenham, B., Pfleeger, S.L., Fenton, N.: Towards a framework for software measurement validation. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 21(12), 929–944 (1995)
Melton, H., Tempero, E.: An empirical study of cycles among classes in Java. Empirical Software Engineering 12(4), 389–415 (2007)
Qualitas Research Group: Qualitas corpus (June 2007), http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ewan/corpus/
Baxter, G., Frean, M., Noble, J., Rickerby, M., Smith, H., Visser, M., Melton, H., Tempero, E.: Understanding the shape of Java software. In: Cook, W. (ed.) ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, Portland, OR, U.S.A, October 2006, pp. 397–412 (2006)
Potanin, A., Noble, J., Frean, M., Biddle, R.: Scale-free geometry in OO programs. Commun. ACM 48(5), 99–103 (2005)
Benlarbi, S., Melo, W.L.: Polymorphism measures for early risk prediction. In: ICSE 1999: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering, pp. 334–344. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1999)
Steimann, F., Mayer, P.: Patterns of interface-based programming. Journal of Object Technology 4(5), 75–94 (2005), http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2005_07/article1
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Tempero, E., Noble, J., Melton, H. (2008). How Do Java Programs Use Inheritance? An Empirical Study of Inheritance in Java Software. In: Vitek, J. (eds) ECOOP 2008 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5142. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70592-5_28
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70592-5_28
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-70591-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70592-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)