A Quantitative Study of the Application of Design Patterns in Java

Using design patterns is a widely accepted method to improve software development. There are many benefits of the application of patterns claimed in the literature. The most cited claim is that design patterns can provide a common design vocabulary and therefore improve greatly communication between software designers. Most of the claims are supported by experiences reports of practitioners, but there is a lack of quantitative research concerning the actual application of design patterns and about the realization of the claimed benefits. In this paper we analyze the development process of over 1000 open source software projects using version control information. We explore this information to gain an insight into the differences of software development with and without design patterns. By analyzing these differences we provide evidence that design patterns are used for communication and that there is a significant difference between developers who use design patterns and who do not.