An Empirical Study of the Impact of Two Antipatterns, Blob and Spaghetti Code, on Program Comprehension

Antipatterns are "poor" solutions to recurring design problems which are conjectured in the literature to make object-oriented systems harder to maintain. However, little quantitative evidence exists to support this conjecture. We performed an empirical study to investigate whether the occ...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2011 15th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering pp. 181 - 190
Main Authors Abbes, M, Khomh, F, Guéhéneuc, Yann-Gaël, Antoniol, G
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.03.2011
Subjects
Analysis of variance
Antipatterns
Blob
Empirical Software Engineering
Indexes
Java
Maintenance engineering
NASA
Program Comprehension
Program Maintenance
Programming
Spaghetti Code
Time measurement
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Summary:Antipatterns are "poor" solutions to recurring design problems which are conjectured in the literature to make object-oriented systems harder to maintain. However, little quantitative evidence exists to support this conjecture. We performed an empirical study to investigate whether the occurrence of antipatterns does indeed affect the understandability of systems by developers during comprehension and maintenance tasks. We designed and conducted three experiments, with 24 subjects each, to collect data on the performance of developers on basic tasks related to program comprehension and assessed the impact of two antipatterns and of their combinations: Blob and Spaghetti Code. We measured the developers' performance with: (1) the NASA task load index for their effort, (2) the time that they spent performing their tasks, and, (3) their percentages of correct answers. Collected data show that the occurrence of one antipattern does not significantly decrease developers' performance while the combination of two antipatterns impedes significantly developers. We conclude that developers can cope with one antipattern but that combinations of antipatterns should be avoided possibly through detection and refactorings.
ISBN:9781612842592
1612842593
ISSN:1534-5351
DOI:10.1109/CSMR.2011.24