Design Pattern Analysis with Software Evolution Data

The influences of design patterns o n software quality have attracted increasing attention in the area of software engineering, as design patterns encapsulate valuable knowledge to resolve design problems, and more importantly to improve the design quality. Since most design patterns are designed to enhance the maintainability, a system with such design patterns is expected to have lower maintenance load in its further evolution. However, sometimes design patterns are over applied or mis-used in many systems, which will cause another maintenance problem or impair the system performance. Therefore, lots of researchers proposed their approaches to evaluate the quality of design patterns or their deployment. However, there is no approach taking the software evolution into concern, even it is the major issue a design pattern addresses. In this paper, we propose a new approach to formulate the evaluation of a design pattern's utilization using the evolution data. We also conduct our approach to 11 design patterns over 15 projects which provide software evolution data. The analysis results show that the utilization of deployed design patterns does not have significant difference among the design patterns in the evolution of software design.