Old dogs and new tricks: retraining legacy programmers in object oriented technology

Faced with a chronic shortage of skilled object-oriented programmers, and burdened with an oversupply of procedural programmers leaving Y2K projects, organizations must find ways of retraining existing programmers in the new tricks of object technology. However, traditional methods of training do not address the difficulties of making the mind shift from one paradigm to another. This paper describes an effort to develop a course that shifts experienced procedural programmers into “object thinking,” thus making subsequent traditional OO training more efficient and effective. We describe a long-term exploratory field study that follows students over two years and compare their OO thinking to that of expert OO programmers and to programmers who underwent traditional OO training. This research is supported by a grant from The Boeing Company.