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While little or no empirical validation exists for many of software engineering's basic assumptions, the need for scientific experimentation remains clear. Several assumptions are made about the factors affecting software reuse, and in particular, the role of the object-oriented paradigm. This paper describes the preliminary results of a controlled experiment designed to evaluate the impact of the objectoriented paradigm on software reuse. The experiment concludes that (1) the object-oriented paradigm substantially improves productivity, although a significant part of this improvement is due to the effect of reuse, (2) reuse without regard to language paradigm improves productivity, (3) language differences are far more important when programmers reuse than when they do not, and (4) the object-oriented paradigm has a particular affinity to reuse. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. o 1991 ACM 89791-446-5/91/0010/0184...$1.50

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New software tools and methodologies make claims that managers often believe intuitively without evidence. Specifically, many unsupported claims have been made about object-oriented programming. However, without scientific evidence, it is impossible to accept these claims as valid. Although experimentation has been done in the past, most of the research is very recent and the most relevant research has serious drawbacks. This paper describes an experiment which compares the maintainability of two functionally equivalent systems in order to explore the claim that systems developed with object-oriented languages are more easily maintained than those programmed with procedural languages. We found supporting evidence that programmers produce more maintainable code with an object oriented language than with a standard procedural language.