Are object protocols burdensome?: an empirical study of developer forums

Abstract

Object protocols are a commonly studied research problem, but there is little known about their usability in practice. In particular, there is little research to show that object protocols cause difficulty for developers. In this work, we use community forums to find empirical evidence that object protocols are burdensome for developers. We analyzed 427 threads from the Spring and ASP.NET forums and discovered that 69 were on a protocol violation. We found that violations of protocols result in unusual runtime behavior rather than exceptions in 45% of our threads, that questions took an average of 62 hours to resolve, and that even though 54% of questions were repeated violations of similar protocols, the manifestation of the violation at runtime was different enough that developers could not search for similar questions.