Transparent Persistence Appears Problematic for Software Maintenance - A Randomized, Controlled Experiment

Pietu Pohjalainen

2013

Abstract

Information retrieval from a database is the backbone of many applications. For building object-oriented systems with a relational persistence engine, a common approach is to use an object-to-relational mapping library for handling the mismatch between object-oriented and relational data models. These components should make the application programmer oblivious to the choice of relational database. To study the effects of transparent persistence, we conducted a randomized, controlled study for 16 students, who were given a number of maintenance tasks on a sample software. For half of attendees, the sample software was written using the transparent persistence approach. For the second half the sample software used a self-configuring component for automatically generating database queries. We found out that the group using transparent persistence were performing worse than the group using self-configuring queries. Attendees in both groups were using the same amount of time for performing the given maintenance tasks, but the transparent persistence group was outperformed by a factor of three in the number of correct submissions. The use of transparent persistence turned out to be a major error source. This gives us a reason to doubt the usefulness of transparent persistence in the long run.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Pohjalainen P. (2013). Transparent Persistence Appears Problematic for Software Maintenance - A Randomized, Controlled Experiment . In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-8565-62-4, pages 25-35. DOI: 10.5220/0004417900250035

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase13,
author={Pietu Pohjalainen},
title={Transparent Persistence Appears Problematic for Software Maintenance - A Randomized, Controlled Experiment},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2013},
pages={25-35},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004417900250035},
isbn={978-989-8565-62-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Transparent Persistence Appears Problematic for Software Maintenance - A Randomized, Controlled Experiment
SN - 978-989-8565-62-4
AU - Pohjalainen P.
PY - 2013
SP - 25
EP - 35
DO - 10.5220/0004417900250035