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

Hanenberg, Stefan; Kleinschmager, Sebastian; Robbes, Romain; Tanter, Éric; Stefik, Andreas

doi:10.1007/s10664-013-9289-1

Cited by 69 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Our results show the point of view of programmers about the use of types. This analysis complements, with a different point of view, existing studies based on controlled experiments [9,14,19,20,22,25,31].…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 69%

“…As found in the recent work of Hanenberg et al [20], untyped code potentially has a positive impact on the development time of easier tasks. In such case, programmers might not type their declarations in scripts or test classes since this would allow them to finish their tasks faster.…”

Section: Q2: Do Programmers Use Types Less Often In Test Classes and mentioning

confidence: 86%

“…In a recent experiment, Hanenberg et al [20] studied the impact of the use of types on the development time of programmers while performing tasks on an undocumented API. The experiment divided 27 people in two groups.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

How do programmers use optional typing?

Souza¹,

Figueiredo²

2014

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Modularity

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The recent popularization of dynamically typed languages, such as Ruby and JavaScript, has brought more attention to the discussion about the impact of typing strategies on development. Types allow the compiler to find type errors earlier and potentially improve the readability and maintainability of code. On the other hand, "untyped" code may be easier to change and require less work from programmers. This paper tries to identify the programmers' point of view about these tradeoffs. An analysis of the source code of 6638 projects written in Groovy, a programming language which features optional typing, shows in which scenarios programmers prefer to type or not to type their declarations. Our results show that types are popular in the definition of module interfaces, but are less used in scripts, test classes and frequently changed code. There is no correlation between the size and age of projects and how their constructs are typed. Finally, we also found evidence that the background of programmers influences how they use types.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Section: Q2: Do Programmers Use Types Less Often In Test Classes and mentioning

confidence: 86%

See 1 more Smart Citation

How do programmers use optional typing?

Souza¹,

Figueiredo²

2014

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Modularity

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show abstract

“…In the last few years, there have been a flurry of studies comparing the benefits of static and dynamic types [16,29,17]. This research suggests that dynamic types have an advantage for small, greenfield tasks, while static types have an advantage for larger, maintenance tasks.…”

Section: Type Annotations As Documentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structuring Documentation to Support State Search: A Laboratory Experiment about Protocol Programming

Sunshine

Herbsleb

Aldrich

2014

ECOOP 2014 – Object-Oriented Programming

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Abstract. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) often define object protocols. Objects with protocols have a finite number of states and in each state a different set of method calls is valid. Many researchers have developed protocol verification tools because protocols are notoriously difficult to follow correctly. However, recent research suggests that a major challenge for API protocol programmers is effectively searching the state space. Verification is an ineffective guide for this kind of search. In this paper we instead propose Plaiddoc, which is like Javadoc except it organizes methods by state instead of by class and it includes explicit state transitions, state-based type specifications, and rich state relationships. We compare Plaiddoc to a Javadoc control in a betweensubjects laboratory experiment. We find that Plaiddoc participants complete state search tasks in significantly less time and with significantly fewer errors than Javadoc participants.

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“…In their study [61], Hanenberg et al presented an experiment investigating if static type systems improve maintainability compared to dynamic type systems. They found that static type systems were benecial in understanding source code and xing type errors, but not in xing semantic errors.…”

Section: Maintainability Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maintainability of Source Code and its Connection to Version Control History Metrics

Faragó¹

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

Cited by 69 publications

References 26 publications

How do programmers use optional typing?

How do programmers use optional typing?

Structuring Documentation to Support State Search: A Laboratory Experiment about Protocol Programming

Maintainability of Source Code and its Connection to Version Control History Metrics

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