Empirical Investigation of the Impact of the Adapter Design Pattern on Software Maintainability

Design patterns have a key role in software development process. However, their impact on software quality is not well investigated. There is no common agreement on how design patterns impact software quality. This paper aims to empirically investigate whether the Adapter design pattern impacts software maintainability positively or negatively. To achieve this aim, refactoring techniques have been applied to generate a non-pattern version for four subject systems. Then, software metrics have been calculated and compared for both versions; the pattern version and non-pattern version. The correlation of software metrics to software maintainability have been used and adopted from previous research studies. The empirical results show that the Adapter pattern versions have a better software metrics than do the non-Adapter pattern versions i.e. a sign that the Adapter design pattern impacts software maintainability positively.