An approach for software design method comparison

Design is to create a product in the process that transforms “what you want” to “how you realize it”. Many design methods have been suggested in the software research community in the past. Hence, to know the differences between design methods or to understand the benefits of a single method, many papers about software design methods comparisons have been published. However, most of them are from subjective observations or designer's surveys. In other words, none of the past studies provided an objective basis for design comparison. In addition, there is no systematic and generic approach that can be applied universally to any design method or process in an empirical study. To remedy this, we proposed a Template-based Design Method Comparison Approach (TDMCA). In this paper, we explain TDMCA and demonstrate the evaluation of it. In our evaluation, we use Object-oriented (OO) system designs to validate TDMCA. Therefore, a graph-based similarity is created to measure the result. The evaluation result convinces us that TDMCA can provide the basis for objectively comparing any different design methods.