Impact of design patterns on software quality: a systematic literature review

Abstract

The impact of design patterns on quality attributes has been extensively evaluated in studies with different perspectives, objectives, metrics, and quality attributes, leading to contradictive and hard to compare results. The authors' objective is to explain these results by considering confounding factors, practices, metrics, or implementation issues that affect quality. Furthermore, there is a lack of research that connects design patterns evaluations to patterns development studies. Accordingly, they also aim at providing an initiate on how patterns structure and implementation can be improved, to promote software quality. To achieve their goals, conducted a systematic literature review by searching the literature for related studies. The study covers the period between years 2000 and 2018. They identified 804 candidate papers. After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, they were left with 50 primary studies. Their results show that documentation of patterns, size of pattern classes, and the scattering degree of patterns have clear impact on quality. In case studies, researchers used different metrics applied to different modules. Controlled experiments have major design differences. Reaching consensuses on the effect of patterns requires considering influencing factors, using unified metrics, and an agreement on what modules to measure. Studying how to improve patterns modularity is recommended for future research.

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“…We have strictly followed the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Charters, 23 Kitchenham et al, 22 Petersen et al, 24 and Petersen et al 25 to achieve an impartial review. These guidelines have been widely adopted in SLR, surveys, and SMS 41‐44 …”

Teaching Software Engineering using Abstraction through Modeling

“…Design patterns as a model of abstraction has been around in the fields of architecture (Alexander, 1977), education (Maher, 2020, and SWE (Wedyan, 2020). Software engineering discipline has certain dimensions that are very important both for students in the educational domain and for the professionals practicing in the field.…”

“…Design patterns provide solutions to the common recurring problems that software developers face in developing high-quality software systems (Wedyan, 2020). Design patterns and pattern languages originated from Alexander et al in the field of architecture in 1977 (Alexander, 1977).…”

“…Later in the mid-1990s Gamma et al (Gamma, 1995) proposed applying the concept of design patterns in the field of object-oriented software development (Wedyan, 2020). They proposed the gang of four (GoF) patterns which includes a set of 23 patterns in three categories of structural, creational, and behavioral patterns (Wedyan, 2020). The creational patterns break down into five patterns that address problems related to the creation of objects.…”

“…The structural category includes seven patterns that provide the relationship between objects and the behavioral category consists of eleven patterns that help in designing how the objects interact with each other. Application of design patterns in software engineering has multiple advantages such as better decision making, enhancing communication of design decisions among developers, improving the software reusability, and as a result saving development cost, in addition to satisfying the nonfunctional requirements of the software systems (Wedyan, 2020).…”