Towards a Framework to Assess the Impact of Design Patterns on Software Metrics

Design patterns are reusable solutions to common design problems. They speed up the development process and help to document software systems. This paper presents a framework to assess the impact of design patterns on software metrics. Our proposed framework applies refactoring techniques to generate non-pattern version of a subject system. Then, software metrics have been calculated and compared for both versions; the pattern version and non-pattern version. The proposed framework has been applied to two subject systems and one design pattern. The evaluation results show that there is no consistent behavior of the software metrics between the non-pattern version and the pattern version.