An Investigation into the Impact of OO Design on Program Debugging with Individual and Collaborative Approaches

Abstract

Object Oriented (OO) programming paradigm is widely used in software development. The primary objective of this paper is to study the impact of OO design features on the primary cognitive process namely debugging. It is an accepted fact that software engineering processes require a significant amount of time in debugging. The debugging in turn contains program comprehension and testing as the central tasks. In pair programming, two programmers work collaboratively on the same algorithm, design or programming task, sitting side by side at one computer. This practice has been used several times in the last decades as an improved way of developing software. Various researchers emphasize the need for resources to understand the relation between the cognitive activities on Program debugging and the structure of programming language. The design features were extracted using the OO metrics. From the study conducted, it is clear that depth of inheritance, coupling, number of children, and number of public methods should be reduced to enhance the debugging of any program when performed individually or in pair.  It is also observed that in order to enhance the debugging ability the coupling should be minimized.