Cognitive Activities and Levels of Abstraction in Procedural and Object-Oriented Design

The research reported in this article provides descriptions of design activities and of the evolving designs for expert procedural and expert object-oriented (OO) designers and for novice OO designers who also had extensive procedural experience. Ten experienced programmers were observed while designing software that would serve as a scoring system for swim meet competitions. Talk-aloud protocols were collected and analyzed for different types of cognitive activities and strategies that occurred during the course of design. In particular, we analyzed Nancy Pennington is a cognitive psychologist with a background in software design and an interest in the learning and performance of complex skills; she is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Adrienne Y. Lee is a cognitive psychologist with a background in electrical engineering and an interest in human-computer interaction and learning; she is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at New Mexico State University. Bob Rehder is a cognitive psychologist with a background in software and system design and an interest in learning; he is a Graduate Student in Psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.