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Summary: Evaluation of Global Hierarchical Object Graphs
for Coding Activities: a Controlled Experiment
Nariman Ammar Marwan Abi-Antoun
Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University
Abstract--It is widely believed that diagrams are useful for
program comprehension. To help with the comprehension of an
object-oriented system, a diagram of the runtime structure shows
the system's runtime structure in terms of objects and their
relations, and complements widely-used diagrams of the code
structure such as class diagrams. One recently proposed diagram
of the runtime structure, the Ownership Object Graphs (OOG), is
a global object graph that conveys architectural hierarchy based
on annotations in the code. In this work, we ask the research
question: do developers benefit from using OOGs, in addition to
class diagrams, during their coding activities?
This paper contributes the first controlled experiment eval-
uating global object graphs in relation to class diagrams. We
observed 10 developers, for 3 hours each, perform coding
activities on an object-oriented framework application. We found
that developers struggled with many questions about the object
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