The following two lists summarize the differences between the two interfaces. It uses this result to then determine if they should be swapped for their sort. Therefore, it is plausible that the results are different for closed-source software and may not be representative of the overall population, but only for open-source software. The objective was to determine if and to what degree these variants are consistent with one another when used to assess the maintainability of a single software system and when used to compare the maintainability of different software systems. This is also the case with the aforementioned studies, as the choice of the variant used for the maintainability measurement of object-oriented software varies across them. Exploring Maintainability Index Variants for Software Maintainability Measurement in Object-Oriented Systems. Now all I needed to do is to compare thefakeExpectedwith the actual result from the test. Avg. However, this must still be overwritten accordingly. The method parses a reference object as a parameter. One major threat to external validity is related to the software systems on which the research is based, including sample size, selection bias, and subject characteristics. To compare two elements, it asks Which is greater? Compare method returns -1, 0, or 1 to say if it is less than, equal, or greater to the other. Let us look then at the code inside Object.equals() method and understand its internals. We use cookies on our website to ensure you get the best experience. SomeClass) but I can still use a plain vanilla unit testing framework. If the minimum and maximum variables are equal then print Equal elements. Keep reading to see how hard it is and how you can take advantage of it to improve your coding skills. Compute all the permutations of the string. How do different Maintainability Index variants perform when utilized for maintainability measurement between different software systems? To overcome this and compare JSON data semantically, we need to load the data into a structure in memory that's not affected by things like whitespace or by the order of an object's keys. In this program, you'll learn to compare two strings in Java. Dahiya, S.S.; Chhabra, J.K.; Kumar, S. Use of genetic algorithm for software maintainability metrics conditioning. ; resources, B.. Dubey, S.K. Although concerns regarding the appropriateness of the Index for object-oriented languages have been expressed because the measure was initially proposed for systems developed in procedural programming languages [, As discussed above, several variants of the Index exist and are often used interchangeably. This may offer intriguing insights into whether and how the selection of Index variants affects the results and established findings in the software engineering research community. The next threat to internal validity is related to the methods of data analysis used. The two objects will be equal if they share the same memory address. Each Java object is associated with the hash code. To sort a given List, ComparatorClass must implement a Comparator interface. Implementing the equals method for the before example: Example 3: In the above example, the equals() method is checking if all the values match or not. using the operators <, <=, ==, =>, >. Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own. A fuzzy approach for evaluation of maintainability of object oriented software system. Before Java 8, sorting a collection would involve creating an anonymous inner class for the Comparator used in the sort: 3. We will be creating two objects and set the first object to "BMW" and the other object to "AUDI". The above program produced the output saying both e1, e3 objects are not the same even though both objects are having the same values. Overall, the findings of this research have the potential to benefit both researchers and practitioners in the field of software engineering by providing a better understanding of how the selection of Index variant affects the perception of the maintainability of software systems. 2021. Kaur and Singh [, Although there are some similarities with the existing work, the lack of a comprehensive approach to comparing multiple variations of the Index makes our work the first of its kind in the field. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Engineering and Communication Technology, Maharashtra, India, 1011 March 2017; Satapathy, S., Bhateja, V., Joshi, A., Eds. How to clone an ArrayList to another ArrayList in Java. "Exploring Maintainability Index Variants for Software Maintainability Measurement in Object-Oriented Systems" Applied Sciences 13, no. In Java, the == operator compares that two references are identical or not. In the next two sections, we will see the example programs on ArrayList and HashMap classes. In the below program, Created two Employee objects with different values. Suppose we have an Array/ArrayList of our own class type, containing fields like roll no, name, address, DOB, etc, and we need to sort the array based on Roll no or name? Ignoring which Index variant is used to assess maintainability could lead to misleading perceptions. Method 2: Using comparator interface- Comparator interface is used to order the objects of a user-defined class. Ideally I would have liked to write the following test: Unfortunately it would fail. ; software, T.H. Help us to further improve by taking part in this short 5 minute survey, RBCN-Net: A Data-Driven Inertial Navigation Algorithm for Pedestrians, Sum Rate Optimization Scheme of UAV-Assisted NOMA under Hardware Impairments, The Impact of Agile Methodology on Project Success, with a Moderating Role of Persons Job Fit in the IT Industry of Pakistan, Software Engineering: Computer Science and System, http://www.virtualmachinery.com/sidebar4.htm, https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021, http://www.virtualmachinery.com/jhawkprod.htm, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/code-quality/code-metrics-maintainability-index-range-and-meaning, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Original Maintainability Index with comment part, Improved Maintainability Index with comment part, Maintainability Index using Lines Of Code only, JHawk Maintainability Index with comment part, Average Percent of Lines of Comments per module, Evaluating the maintainability prediction power of the Index for object-oriented software on the class level, There is a slight inverse relationship between the measures, Comparing the Index calculations from two frameworks on a software and component level, The difference between calculations is negligible, Investigating the consistency of software maintenance metrics at the system level, The measures are not mutually consistent for evaluating maintainability, Comparing methods for software technical debt identification on the between-release level, Releases of twenty Python software systems, The Index and SIG method show more similarity, while the Index and SQALE analysis show less, Christa, S.; Madhusudhan, V.; Suma, V.; Rao, J.J. Software Maintenance: From the Perspective of Effort and Cost Requirement. Its a good rule that helps me write good, robust unit tests but like all such rules of thumb its not always right (just most of the time). Collections API uses hashcode() and equals() Method, 5. Murthy, A.R.C. All source codes for the included software systems were obtained from the original (i.e., not forked) GitHub repositories. The Maintainability Index is frequently used as a single-valued measure for estimating the overall maintainability of software, taking these aspects into account in different ways through various Index variants. String class from the Java.lang package. One of the theoretical implications of this study that could be further exploited in software-engineering-related research is the insight into the characteristics of the evaluated variants when applied in different contexts, which was gained through the empirical evaluation and comparison of different variants of the Index. Gradinik, M.; Berani, T.; Karakati, S. Impact of historical software metric changes in predicting future maintainability trends in open-source software development. ; Foreman, J.; Gerken, M. GitHub. In Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Machine Learning, Big Data, Cloud and Parallel Computing (COMITCon), Faridabad, India, 1416 February 2019; pp. [, Prabowo, G.; Suryotrisongko, H.; Tjahyanto, A. First, we convert the JavaScript objects to JSON strings and then compare those strings . Remember: When we override the equals() method, it is necessary to override the hashCode() method. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. = standard deviation, Min. 203208. To answer RQ1 and RQ2.1, the most recently released version at the time of conducting the experiments for each of the 45 software systems under study was used. Overriding equals() method in the Employee Object, 4. [, Coleman, D. Assessing maintainability. Java Program to Compare Two Objects Difficulty Level : Medium Last Updated : 16 Jun, 2021 Read Discuss Courses Practice Video An object is an instance of a class that has its state and behavior. = minimum, Max. This can be done by using the org.apache.commons.beanutils.BeanComparator comparator. Disclaimer/Publishers Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely = median, Std. For instance, Index variant thresholds for object-oriented software should be refined in the future while also considering the specifics of the Index variant used for maintainability assessment. Correlations between Internal Software Metrics and Software Dependability in a Large Population of Small C/C++ Programs. In fact, its fun to do things the hard way, isnt it? With extensive use of the Maintainability Index in software research and practice, the Index has been fine-tuned over time to better represent the maintainability characteristics of software systems, to ease the calculation, or to aid the interpretation of the results. As the result, JSON.stringify(person3) === JSON.stringify(person1) is false and JSON.stringify(person3) === JSON.stringify(person2) is false. In the below program, nowhere equals() method is called manually but we called the indexOf() method that internally calls the equals() method. 1996-2023 MDPI (Basel, Switzerland) unless otherwise stated. We simply use the equal to operator (==) to compare the two strings, which compares the value Bold to Bold and prints Equal. interesting to readers, or important in the respective research area. Researchers should carefully examine which Index variants should be used in their studies, as the results can be impacted by the choices made. JavaTpoint offers college campus training on Core Java, Advance Java, .Net, Android, Hadoop, PHP, Web Technology and Python. 13751380. 2023, 13, 2972. Every class in java has one parent class that is Object class and it has equals () method to compare two any objects. Try Programiz PRO: acknowledge that you have read and understood our, Data Structure & Algorithm Classes (Live), Data Structure & Algorithm-Self Paced(C++/JAVA), Android App Development with Kotlin(Live), Full Stack Development with React & Node JS(Live), GATE CS Original Papers and Official Keys, ISRO CS Original Papers and Official Keys, ISRO CS Syllabus for Scientist/Engineer Exam, Spring Boot - Start/Stop a Kafka Listener Dynamically, Parse Nested User-Defined Functions using Spring Expression Language (SpEL), Split() String method in Java with examples, Object Oriented Programming (OOPs) Concept in Java. Visual Studio. 2021. The key differences between the variants lie in the selection of the software metrics used and/or the amount of influence the selected software metrics have on maintainability. Therefore, it is essential to understand how maintainable a software system is as it is being developed. Due to this behavior there are many (myself included) who suggest overridingEqualsto make sure that the actual values are compared, which could be a problem if our production code cannot be changed to accommodate our tests. ; Johannessen, E.B. [. Reddy, B.R. Learn more. All Java classes implements the Object class by default. Ardito, L.; Coppola, R.; Barbato, L.; Verga, D. A tool-based perspective on software code maintainability metrics: A systematic literature review. Although different Index variants present different values when subjected to the same software system, the Index variant values are very strongly positively correlated and indicate in a similar manner how maintainability evolves between releases and from a more long-term perspective. [. x holds the same value as we have passed in the equals() method. It returns true because the object of double class i.e. Correlation coefficients: Appropriate use and interpretation. As you can see, the result book1 === book2 is false despite the equality of their content because they have different references. However, it can be overridden in any way possible i.e if one or two values match, etc. Below is the implementation: Java import java.util. Questioning software maintenance metrics: A comparative case study. This tutorial shows you how to get the list of properties with different value on two objects. In this class, we have created two instances of the Employee class i.e. Microsoft. ; Liu, G.; Morasca, S. An empirical evaluation of the Cognitive Complexity measure as a predictor of code understandability. Java Program to Compare two Boolean Arrays, Java Program to Compare two Double Arrays, Compare two strings lexicographically in Java, equals() and deepEquals() Method to Compare two Arrays in Java. Though the values of dog1 and dog2 are the same, equals() method always checks the reference of the two objects i.e if both the objects passed refer to the same object or not and not their values. For example, if code documentation significantly benefits software maintainability, a variant incorporating code comments into the Index computation should be used. Next, focusing on identifying any significant differences between the variants, the pairwise differences between Index variants were assessed. https://doi.org/10.3390/app13052972, Heriko, Tjaa, and Botjan umak. When implementing it, we need to make sure that the method returns: A positive integer, if the current object is greater than the parameter object A negative integer, if the current object is less than the parameter object In Proceedings of the 2022 45th Jubilee International Convention on Information, Communication and Electronic Technology (MIPRO), Opatija, Croatia, 2327 May 2022; pp. In summary, the key contributions of this paper are: (1) a review of Maintainability Index variants utilized for maintainability measurement in object-oriented software; (2) an empirical investigation on how Maintainability Index variants perform when utilized for the maintainability measurement of a single object-oriented system; (3) an empirical investigation on how Maintainability Index variants perform when utilized for the maintainability measurement of an object-oriented software system in the context of other systems, i.e., other versions of the same software system and completely different software systems. In this article, You've seen how to compare two objects in java using equals() method of Object class. I propose another option one that could be useful , especially when theres a need to compare different properties in different tests. The following abbreviations are used in this manuscript: Note that from the first issue of 2016, this journal uses article numbers instead of page numbers. Sawilowsky, S.S. New effect size rules of thumb. If youve been using unit tests for some time you might have come to a conclusion that using multiple asserts is not always a bad idea in fact for some tests its the only way to go. This resulted in several defined variants of the Index. Lodash's isEqual() function is the most sophisticated way to compare two objects. ; methodology, T.H. Firstly, our study differs in the inclusion of multiple commonly used Index variants in the comparison, while most studies, except for [. Papamichail, M.D. Use Collections.max () method and store the return value in max variable. Malhotra, R.; Khanna, M. Particle swarm optimization-based ensemble learning for software change prediction. In order to be human-readable, please install an RSS reader. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, Koroka Cesta 46, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia. By using our site, you To ensure the most-accurate assessment, the specific variant selected should take into account the relevant aspects of maintainability that best represent the maintainability of the software system in question. articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without Conceptualization, T.H. Author: Venkatesh - I love to learn and share the technical stuff. Example 1: Although equals() method can be used to compare the values of two strings, it is not really useful by default to compare two objects without overriding it. In Java, hash code is a 32-bit signed integer value. For more information, please refer to and B.. Testwell CMT++/CMTJava. If anyone of these properties values are not the same then it returns false. We rarely compare the object references in real projects. 759768. about unit testing have heard about the one assert per test rule. = minimum, Max. Arisholm, E.; Briand, L.C. Sjberg et al. When comparing two software systems based on their maintainability assessments from different Index variants, if one software is easier to maintain than the other according to one variant, it is very likely that the same holds true according to any other variant. Visual StudioMaintainability Index. [. To address these threats, our research relied on a version of 45 different software systems and all versions of 3 software systems, a sample generally larger than that in related work. Granja-Alvarez, J.C.; Barranco-Garca, M.J. A Method for Estimating Maintenance Cost in a Software Project: A Case Study. In, To assess the relationship between Index variants in the context of comparing the maintainability of versions of the same software system, a correlation analysis was conducted for each case study. Then, we will compare the objects by using the BeanComparator by calling its compare() method. ; Rana, A. To achieve the research objectives, experiments were conducted on Java open-source software systems. (string1 == string2) it returns 0. if (string1 < string2) it returns a negative value. And so usingFakeItEasyI was able to create the following code: What we have here is a newfakeobject a.k.afakeExpectedwhich would call custom code when itsEqualsmethod is called. Based on their maintainability measurement characteristics, the Index variants can be divided into two distinct clusters containing variants that are more similar to one another: Index variants without considering code comments and Index variants that include code comments in their computation. Java 8 - Comparison with Lambdas and example on Java 8 Comparator.comparing(). 8487. Oman, P.; Hagemeister, J. Vijaya; Sharma, S.; Batra, N. Comparative Study of Single Linkage, Complete Linkage, and Ward Method of Agglomerative Clustering. Create a HashMap object and add a few employee objects as key and value will be the salary of the employee object. Ren, Y.; Xing, T.; Chen, X.; Chai, X. The object-oriented paradigm is one of the dominant programming paradigms for modeling and developing software. We will be creating two objects and set the first object to "BMW" and the other object to "AUDI". Furthermore, this study identified some research gaps and suggested some possible directions for future research efforts. To explore the variants and understand how they compare when evaluating software maintainability, an experiment was conducted with 45 Java-based object-oriented software systems. The software maintainability index revisited. ; investigation, T.H. Another threat to external validity is the set of Index variants studied. [. [. ; Yiit, T. Energy Efficiency Analysis of Code Refactoring Techniques for Green and Sustainable Software in Portable Devices. Example 1: The above implementation along with usage of hashCode(): How to Compare Two TreeMap Objects in Java? Anyone who has ever Googled (Binged?) whether they are the same object or not. Follow to join 3M+ monthly readers. A-143, 9th Floor, Sovereign Corporate Tower, We use cookies to ensure you have the best browsing experience on our website. A systematic and comprehensive investigation of methods to build and evaluate fault prediction models. and B.. During maintenance, software systems undergo continuous correction and enhancement activities due to emerging faults, changing environments, and evolving requirements, making this phase expensive and time-consuming, often exceeding the initial development costs. Compare Two Employee Objects in java In the below program, Created two Employee objects with different values. 1. Let us override the equals() and hashcode() methods in Employee class. 2021. This issue has already been noted by systematic literature reviews conducted in the research field [, In the literature, the Maintainability Index has been used as a measure of maintainability extensively researched from various perspectives. Find support for a specific problem in the support section of our website. Fioravanti, F.; Nesi, P. Estimation and prediction metrics for adaptive maintenance effort of object-oriented systems. Copyright 2011-2021 www.javatpoint.com. ; supervision, B.. Virtual Machinery. Pratap, A.; Chaudhary, R.; Yadav, K. Estimation of software maintainability using fuzzy logic technique. 2023. ; Papesh, M.H. JHawk. By using this website, you agree with our Cookies Policy. Coleman, D.; Ash, D.; Lowther, B.; Oman, P. Using metrics to evaluate software system maintainability. Please do not add any spam links in the comments section. You compare Java primitives (int, long, double, etc.) 8792. Fedoseev, K.; Askarbekuly, N.; Uzbekova, E.; Mazzara, M. Application of Data-Oriented Design in Game Development. Editors Choice articles are based on recommendations by the scientific editors of MDPI journals from around the world. In Proceedings of the 27th International Workshop on Software Measurement and 12th International Conference on Software Process and Product Measurement, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2527 October 2017; Association for Computing Machinery: New York, NY, USA, 2017; pp. Method 2: Using comparator interface- Comparator interface is used to order the objects of a user-defined class. Programming languages, designed mainly for object-oriented programming, namely Java, C#, and Python, are currently widely used and adapted by organizations and software developers [, The maintainability of a system is a software quality factor that reflects the ease with which a system can undergo various modifications in the software maintenance phase [, To quantify the software maintainability of any system with a single value, Oman and Hagemeister [, Another measure of software maintainability is the change metric defined by Li and Henry [, Furthermore, researchers have proposed several maintainability measurement and prediction models based on capturing maintenance performance with cost, time, or effort spent in the maintenance process [, Another way of assessing maintainability is based on the subjective evaluation of software systems by experts [. As an example, imagine we have a list of students who applied for an exam, and another list of students who passed it. [, Counsell, S.; Liu, X.; Eldh, S.; Tonelli, R.; Marchesi, M.; Concas, G.; Murgia, A. Re-visiting the Maintainability Index Metric from an Object-Oriented Perspective. = average, Med. 149154. In Proceedings of the 2020 7th International Conference on Electrical Engineering, Computer Sciences and Informatics (EECSI), Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 12 October 2020; pp. Chowdhury, S.; Holmes, R.; Zaidman, A.; Kazman, R. Revisiting the debate: Are code metrics useful for measuring maintenance effort? Stack Overflow Developer Survey. I will explain both methods using Strings and a self-written "Student" class as examples. In Proceedings of the Software Engineering Productivity Conference, Salt Lake City, UT, USA, 7 April 1992; pp. Available online: Stack Overflow. 2023; 13(5):2972. For example, the expression obj1==obj2 tests the identity, not equality. Several aspects can impact the softwares maintainability, including the codes complexity, the softwares size, and the presence of documentation and comments that help describe the code. 235239. Checking the hash values using hashCode() before entering the equals() reduces the time taken to produce the solution drastically. Objects class from the Java.util . Maintainab. Next, is create two objects with different values and compare them. To compare these strings in Java, we need to use the equals () method of the string. Editors select a small number of articles recently published in the journal that they believe will be particularly If the two objects are equal according to the equals() method, then invoking the hashCode() method on these two objects must produce the same integer value. This means that when focusing on finer-grained results posed by the Index, the selection of the Index variant has even more of an impact on the maintainability perception. One or more elements from. ; data curation, T.H. A variety of data analysis methods (i.e., descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing, correlation analysis, multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, and trend analysis) were used to answer the research questions, which allowed us to evaluate and compare the consistency of several variants of the Index in measuring the maintainability of object-oriented software systems on a large and diverse set of Java software in different contexts.