Documenting Design Patterns in Code Eases Program Maintenance (1997)
| Venue: | In Proc. ICSE Workshop on Process Modeling and Empirical Studies of Software Evolution |
| Citations: | 3 - 2 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Prechelt97documentingdesign,
author = {Lutz Prechelt and Barbara Unger and Michael Philippsen},
title = {Documenting Design Patterns in Code Eases Program Maintenance},
booktitle = {In Proc. ICSE Workshop on Process Modeling and Empirical Studies of Software Evolution},
year = {1997},
pages = {72--76}
}
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Abstract
Software design patterns are a promising idea with many advocates. While subjective reports of their usefulness are available, scientific proof is still missing. We consider the case of programmers using design pattern documentation (in the form of comments in the source program) during maintenance. Is such pattern documentation (PD) helpful for understanding a program more quickly and designing better solutions for given maintenance tasks? We describe a controlled experiment for investigating this question, present its results, and conclude that design pattern documentation can speed up program changes as well as improve their quality. 1 Background Design patterns [3] are a promising approach to simplifying the design and construction as well as the understanding and evolution of software systems. Design patterns are prepackaged design solutions on the level of a few classes ("micro architectures"). They provide a solution approach for a class of problems. Besides the solution(s), de...
Citations
| 4647 | Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software - Gamma, Helm, et al. - 1995 |
| 37 | Industrial experience with design patterns - Beck, Coplien, et al. - 1996 |
| 15 | Experimental Methodology. Allyn and - Christensen - 1994 |
| 14 | Resampling: The new statistics - Simon - 1992 |
| 12 | An experiment on the usefulness of design patterns: Detailed description and evaluation - Prechelt - 1997 |
