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Empirical Software Engineering

Erschienen in:

01.10.2014

An empirical study on the impact of static typing on software maintainability

verfasst von: Stefan Hanenberg, Sebastian Kleinschmager, Romain Robbes, Éric Tanter, Andreas Stefik

Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering | Ausgabe 5/2014

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Abstract

Static type systems play an essential role in contemporary programming languages. Despite their importance, whether static type systems impact human software development capabilities remains open. One frequently mentioned argument in favor of static type systems is that they improve the maintainability of software systems—an often-used claim for which there is little empirical evidence. This paper describes an experiment that tests whether static type systems improve the maintainability of software systems, in terms of understanding undocumented code, fixing type errors, and fixing semantic errors. The results show rigorous empirical evidence that static types are indeed beneficial to these activities, except when fixing semantic errors. We further conduct an exploratory analysis of the data in order to understand possible reasons for the effect of type systems on the three kinds of tasks used in this experiment. From the exploratory analysis, we conclude that developers using a dynamic type system tend to look at different files more frequently when doing programming tasks—which is a potential reason for the observed differences in time.

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The interested reader can find more arguments for both cases online, including the lively discussion available at: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/122205/

For more information about Groovy and the differences it has with Java, the interested reader can consult the following web page: http://groovy.codehaus.org/Differences+from+Java

We plan to gather data on this aspect in future experiments.

Mauchly’s sphericity test was performed using the standard packages implemented in SPSS. The used variables were the within-subject variable programming task and the between-subject variable programming language.

If we anticipate in the next section, we also see that in the numbers of test runs in Fig. 7, where test runs for Groovy are significantly worse for the supposedly simpler CIT1 than they are for CIT2.

Note that the programming tasks in Mayer et al. (2012) were exclusively CIT tasks. Hence, a comparison is only based on the CIT tasks in the here described experiment.

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Titel: An empirical study on the impact of static typing on software maintainability
verfasst von: Stefan Hanenberg
Sebastian Kleinschmager
Romain Robbes
Éric Tanter
Andreas Stefik
Publikationsdatum: 01.10.2014
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering / Ausgabe 5/2014
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-013-9289-1

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