Evaluation of the maintainability of object-oriented software

The experiment described supports the claim that systems developed with object-oriented languages are more maintainable than those developed with procedural languages. In this empirical study, student subjects determined the maintainability of systems developed with two languages by performing maintenance tasks on two functionally identical large programs, one written in an object-oriented language and the other written in a procedural language. Maintenance times, error counts, change counts, and programmers' impressions were collected. The analysis of the data from this experiment showed that systems using object-oriented languages are indeed more maintainable than those built with procedural languages.<
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