Evaluating the Impact of Design Patterns on Software Maintainability: An Empirical Evaluation
Hen Kian Jun, Muhammad Ehsan Rana · 2021 Third International Sustainability and Resilience Conference: Climate Change · 2021
Software maintainability is a critical quality attribute that refers to the efforts required to perform specific changes to the software after deployment. This research aims to prove that the effective use of design patterns leads to a better software maintainability value by empirically evaluating a simpler solution (a solution without applying design patterns) with its refined version (after applying appropriate design patterns). A scenario is used in the paper to generate two working solutions to evaluate both of their maintainability values and justify how the use of design patterns on the refined solution has significantly improved the quality of the software. Furthermore, a critical analysis is performed to compare the results of the refined solution with its equivalent simpler solution. The result of the empirical evaluation indicates that the use of design patterns brought significant improvement to the solution in reducing the complexity and improving the maintainability of the solution.