An Empirical Study of Design Patterns and Software Quality

We present an empirical study of the impact of design patterns on quality attributes in the context of software maintenance and evolution. Our first hypothesis verifies software engineering lore: design patterns impact software quality positively. We show that, contrary to popular beliefs, design patterns in practice impact negatively several quality attributes, thus providing concrete evidence against common lore. We then study design patterns and object-oriented best practices by formulating a second hypothesis on the impact of these principles on quality. We show that results for some design patterns cannot be explained and conclude on the need for further studies on the relation between design patterns and object-oriented best practices. Thus, we bring further evidence that design patterns should be used with caution during development because they may actually impede maintenance and evolution.