Do Rules and Patterns Affect Design Maintainability?

Abstract

At the present time, best rules and patterns have reached a zenith in popularity and diffusion, thanks to the software community's efforts to discover, classify and spread knowledge concerning all types of rules and patterns. Rules and patterns are useful elements, but many features remain to be studied if we wish to apply them in a rational manner.The improvement in quality that rules and patterns can inject into design is a key issue to be analyzed, so a complete body of empirical knowledge dealing with this is therefore necessary. This paper tackles the question of whether design rules and patterns can help to improve the extent to which designs are easy to understand and modify. An empirical study, composed of one experiment and a replica, was conducted with the aim of validating our conjecture. The results suggest that the use of rules and patterns affect the understandability and modifiability of the design, as the diagrams with rules and patterns are more difficult to understand than non-rule/pattern versions and more effort is required to carry out modifications to designs with rules and patterns.

Modularity Analysis of Design Patterns: An Empirical Study

“…Other replications were conducted in several universities [18], [22]. Garzas et al [11] investigated the impact of three DPs on software maintainability. They found that DPs make design diagrams more difficult to understand and consequently requires more time to modify.…”

Quantitative analysis of fault density in design patterns: An empirical study

“…In each replication, different findings on the impact of DPs on maintainability were reported: negative impacts [27,31,41] and no impact [36]. Garzas et al [16] investigated the impact of three different DPs on maintainability as well. In their experiment, maintainability was measured in terms of understandability and modifiability.…”

A Comparative Literature Survey of Design Patterns Impact on Software Quality

“…Garzas et al [7] investigated the relationship between the design patterns and the maintainability in terms of understandability and modifiability. They addressed three patterns: State, Composite and Chain of Responsibility.…”

“…[4] Time required for understanding and modification. [7] 1-Understandability in terms of time, the # of correct answer to some questions and efficiency. 2-Modifiability in terms of time, score of modification and efficiency.…”

“…One version is pattern version and the other is a nonpattern version. [7] They conducted two experiments with two groups of subjects. The first group consists of 10 undergraduate students.…”