An Empirical Study on the Cognitive Difference between the Creators and Users of Object-Oriented Methodology

The main objective of this study is to uncover the differences in the programming behavior between methodology creators and methodology users. We conducted an experiment with methodology creators who have invented one of the major object-oriented methodologies and with professional programmers who have used the same methodology for their software-development projects. In order to explain the difference between the two groups, we propose a theoretical framework that views programming as search in four problem spaces: representation, rule, instance and paradigm spaces. The main problem spaces in programming are the representation and rule spaces, while the paradigm and instance spaces are the supporting spaces. The results of the experiment showed that the methodology creators mostly adopted the paradigm space as their supporting space, while the methodology users chose the instance space as their supporting space. This difference in terms of the supporting space leads to different search behaviors in the main problem spaces, which in turn resulted in different final programs and performance.