Abstract
This paper describes the design and execution of an experiment for establishing the differences in cognitive activity and design strategies between expert and novice object-oriented designers. A three stage experimental session was used to track the evolution of a design through a number of changing specifications. The primary focus of the study is the abstraction level of a design and the effect of this factor on extensibility. This paper represents a work in progress in which the experiment has been designed and executed on a sample of expert participants with final analyses and results not yet available. Consequently, it is the intention of this paper to describe the processes of designing the experiment; the associated analyses and the effort that was taken to guard the internal and external validity of the study.
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