An empirical study of the relationships between design pattern roles and class change proneness

Analyzing the change-proneness of design patterns and the kinds of changes occurring to classes playing role(s) in some design pattern(s) during software evolution poses the basis for guidelines to help developers who have to choose, apply or maintain design patterns. Building on previous work, this paper shifts the focus from design patterns as wholes to the finer-grain level of design pattern roles. The paper presents an empirical study to understand whether there are roles that are more change-prone than others and whether there are changes that are more likely to occur to certain roles. The study relies on data extracted from the source code repositories of three different systems (JHotDraw, Xerces, and Eclipse-JDT) and from 12 design patterns. Results obtained confirm the intuitive behavior about changeability of many roles in design motifs, but also warns about properly designing parts of the motif subject to frequent changes.