Understanding developer practices in Java-based software development

Software developers employ programming language features to build software systems. The use of such language features in a solution design, however, can be influenced by varying guidelines, expert opinions, and community principles. As such cues are meant to encourage good programming practices, and improve quality (e.g., maintainability) of resulting software artifacts, it is expected that developers would adhere to the recommendations they are provided with. But to what extent do developers comply with such recommendations? This thesis addresses this question. The findings of this thesis advance our current understanding of developer behavior and decisions with regard to the use of language features (i.e., adherence to associated recommendations in particular, and the use-cases of studied features in general). It assist us, for example, to inform developers and managers about the current state of software systems, to support language designers to construct better programming languages, and to enrich software engineering education by reflecting developers practices.