The state of the art on design patterns: A systematic mapping of the literature

Design patterns are widely used by software developers to build complex systems. Hence, they have been investigated by many researchers in recent decades. This leads to the emergence of various topics in the design patterns field. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of the research efforts on design patterns for those researchers who seek to enter this area. The main contributions are as follows: (a) identifying research topics in design patterns, (b) quantifying the research emphasis on each topic, and (c) describing the demographics of design patterns research. The last secondary study with similar goals in the design patterns field considers the Gang of Four design patterns only. However, the scope of the current study is all of the design patterns. Moreover, our review covers about six additional years and a larger number of publications and venues. In this systematic mapping study, a total of 2775 papers were identified as relevant, and 637 of them were included. According to the results, design patterns can be classified into six different research topics. As a consequence, it is concluded that Pattern Development, Pattern Mining, and Pattern Usage are the most active topics in the field of design patterns.