A controlled experiment: Do Visitor patterns improve design simplicity?

The uses of design patterns have been widely introduced to software engineer communities. The design patterns are claimed to improve the software quality. However, there is few evidence to support such claim. Also, the benefits of design patterns in software design have also been less studied. As a result, in this study we designed and performed an experiment to investigate whether the design patterns improve the software design simplicity. In particular, we analyzed how easily the software design was understood. We chose the Visitor pattern, which is one of well-known patterns as the design pattern for our study. The result of the study revealed that the Visitor pattern improved the software design simplicity. Specifically the design diagram with the Visitor pattern was easier to understand than the design diagram without the design pattern.