Effect of object orientation on maintainability of software

Maintenance is the set of activities performed after the installation of software. It is well-known that, over the life-time of the software, the maintenance costs can far exceed the development costs. In this paper, we describe an experimental study on the effect of object orientation on maintenance. In particular, we focus on how object orientation fares in maintainability when compared to software designed using function-oriented approaches. For the experiment, a testbed was prepared which consisted of three problems, for each of which the requirement specification, a C implementation and a C++ implementation of an object-oriented design were available. Various maintenance exercises were performed on the the two versions of the projects and different metrics were collected. In these experiments, object-oriented software generally fared better for maintainability