A Comparative Literature Survey of Design Patterns Impact on Software Quality

Many different factors influence the quality of software systems. One factor is the use of design patterns. In this paper we survey the literature for the existing empirical evidence on the impact of the GoF design patterns on software quality attributes. There are two objectives of conducting this survey. The first objective is to evaluate the coverage of the empirical evidence in terms of quality attributes and in terms of design patterns. The second objective is to provide a summary of the impact of design patterns on software quality attributes. The results show that the impact of design patterns have been investigated only on four quality attributes and there is no consensus on the impact of design patterns on them. Furthermore, the results show that not all the GoF design patterns were covered in the literature.