Cited By
View all- Tempero EYang HNoble J(2013)What programmers do with inheritance in javaProceedings of the 27th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming10.1007/978-3-642-39038-8_24(577-601)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2013
An empirical study of overriding in open source Java
Pages 3 - 12
Abstract
Inheritance is a key feature of object-oriented programming. Overriding is one of the most important parts of inheritance, allowing a subclass to replace methods implemented in its superclass. Unfortunately, the way programmers use overriding in practise is not well understood.
We present the first large-scale empirical study of overriding. We describe a suite of metrics that measure overriding and present a corpus analysis that uses those metrics to analyse 100 open-source applications, containing over 100,000 separate classes and interfaces. We found substantial overriding: most subclasses override at least one method and many classes that only declare overriding methods. We also found questionable uses of overriding, such as removing superclass method implementations by overriding them with empty method bodies.
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Index Terms
- An empirical study of overriding in open source Java
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- Australian Comp Soc: Australian Computer Society
- SAP Research
- Queensland University of Technology
- CEED
- CSIRO ICT Centre
- CORE - Computing Research and Education
- Macquarie University-Sydney
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Australian Computer Society, Inc.
Australia
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Published: 01 January 2010
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ACSC '10
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ACSC '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 18 of 60 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 136 of 379 submissions, 36%
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View all- Tempero EYang HNoble J(2013)What programmers do with inheritance in javaProceedings of the 27th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming10.1007/978-3-642-39038-8_24(577-601)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2013
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