Representation of software design using templates: impact on software quality and development effort

As a practice, software design seeks to contribute to developing quality software. During this software development stage, the requirements are translated into a representation of the software (also known as design), whose quality can be evaluated and improved. For undergraduate students, the design is difficult to understand and make. In fact, building a good design seems to require a certain level of cognitive development that few students achieve.The aim of this study is to know the effort dedicated to software detailed design and the effect on software quality when graduating students use templates to represent their design. We conducted a controlled experiment where students develop eight projects following a defined process and recording data from its execution in a software tool. We found that the use of design templates did not improve the quality of the code, measured as the defect density in the unit test phase. Also, the use of templates did not reduce the number of code smells in the analyzed code. Regarding the effort, students who use templates dedicated greater development effort to designing than to coding. Meanwhile, students who did not use templates dedicated four times less effort to designing than to coding.