Evaluation of the visitor pattern to promote software design simplicity

Abstract

Design patterns, which have been widely used by software engineering communities, have been claimed to improve software design in previous studies. However, there is little empirical evidence to support such a claim. Additionally, the benefits of design patterns in software design have not been studied in sufficient detail to date. As a result, in this study, we used empirical methods to evaluate whether design patterns help developers improve the simplicity of software design. In particular, we analyzed how easily a given software design was understood. We chose the well-known Visitor pattern as the design pattern for this study. The results suggest that the Visitor pattern could help developers improve software design simplicity. Specifically, a class diagram with the Visitor pattern was found to be easier to understand than a class diagram without the design pattern.