Impact of Abstract Factory and Decorator Design Patterns on Software Maintainability: Empirical Evaluation using CK Metrics

Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns are the famous set of twenty-three reusable and robust solutions to certain established problems in object-oriented programming that still guides software developers and designers despite having been published in mid-90’s. However, it is relatively difficult to explicitly determine the overall appropriateness and suitability of a design pattern in a software system. Thus, this work attempts to select one attribute from the McCall’s software quality model – maintainability, and empirically evaluate it before and after applying selected design patterns (Abstract Factory and Decorator) within a relatively simple problem scenario to keep the focus on and prove the positive effect of design patterns in object-oriented software solutions in terms of their maintainability.