Improving the quality of object-oriented programs

Object-oriented languages originated in the late '60s and entered widespread industrial use in the early '90s. With this technology's advent came the hope and belief that life from a programming perspective would generally improve. We believed that these languages would foster reuse and, consequently, a reduction in the quantity of code written. We also believed that inheritance, an object-oriented language feature, would result in less testing effort, although D. Perry and G. Kaiser (1990) dispelled this notion. So, if we use object-oriented technology, what should we expect in terms of quality? What can we do to increase our chances of producing highly reliable software? This paper presents four ideas that will improve these chances regardless of the object-oriented language used.