Quality model for assessing object-oriented design patterns under development

Abstract

Object-oriented design patterns are used to solve recurring problems in the design of object-oriented software. The success of existing design patterns encourages researchers and practitioners to propose new design patterns especially for solving recurring design problems in specific domains. Assessing the quality of the design patterns being developed is an important task for a design pattern developer to determine which parts of the patterns need improvement. This paper presents a hierarchical quality model for object-oriented design patterns under development. The model focuses on two quality attributes, i.e. Embedded Knowledge and Pattern Language quality, of the object-oriented design patterns. The model relates several properties of the design pattern descriptions, i.e. usefulness, completeness, consistency, and understandability, to the two quality attributes. Four quality metrics are proposed to quantitatively measure those properties of the design pattern descriptions. In an evaluation, we obtain a satisfactory result as the proposed quality assessment model can be used to complement other existing design pattern evaluation methods.