An empirical study of software reuse by experts in object-oriented design

Jean-Marie Burkhardt (1) , Françoise Détienne (2)

1 LEI - Laboratoire d'Ergonomie Informatique
2 EIFFEL2 - Cognition and Cooperation in Design

This paper presents an empirical study of the software reuse activity by expert designers in the context of object-oriented design. Our study focuses on the three following aspects of reuse : (1) the interaction between some design processes, e.g. constructing a problem representation, searching for and evaluating solutions, and reuse processes, i.e. retrieving and using previous solutions, (2) the mental processes involved in reuse, e.g. example-based retrieval or bottom-up versus top-down expanding of the solution, and (3) the mental representations constructed throughout the reuse activity, e.g. dynamic versus static representations. Some implications of these results for the specification of software reuse support environments are discussed.

Mots clés: Psychology of programming; software design; software reuse

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Jean-Marie Burkhardt, Françoise Détienne. An empirical study of software reuse by experts in object-oriented design. IFIP TC13 Interantional Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT'95, Jun 1995, Lillehammer, Norway. ⟨inria-00128354⟩