On the Relationship Between the Object-Oriented Paradigm and Software Reuse: An Empirical Investigation

This paper describes the results of a controlled experiment designed to evaluate the impact of the object-oriented paradigm on software reuse. The experiment concludes that (1) the object-oriented paradigm substantially improves productivity over the procedural paradigm, (2) language differences are far more important when programmers reuse than when they do not, (3) under both moderate and strong encouragement to reuse, the object-oriented paradigm promotes higher productivity than the procedural paradigm, (4) software reuse improves productivity no matter which language paradigm is used, and (5) the object-oriented paradigm has a particular affinity to the reuse process.