Many teams transition to object technology expecting a "silver bullet" for productivity, only to find themselves trapped in refactoring loops or complex inheritance hierarchies that make the codebase brittle. To survive, you must treat the project not just as a technical challenge, but as a management and cultural shift.
Organizations often spend thousands on CASE tools while neglecting the developers' mindset. Training developers in "object-think"—the ability to model problem domains effectively—is the single most significant cost but also the highest predictor of success. Surviving Object-Oriented Projects
The most common cause of OO project failure is the "big bang" release. Surviving projects focus on: Many teams transition to object technology expecting a
Focus on picking nouns for classes and verbs for methods to stay close to the actual business problem. Surviving Object-Oriented Projects: Cockburn
Surviving Object-Oriented Projects: Cockburn, Alistair - Amazon.com
Avoid deep inheritance hierarchies (more than two levels is often "brittle") and prefer composition to keep the system maintainable. 4. Manage the Human Element