Realization of best practices in software engineering and scientific writing through ready-to-use project skeletons

Efforts in providing high-quality scientific software are hardly rewarded, as scientific output is typically measured in terms of publications in high ranking journals. As a result, scientific software is often developed without proper documentation and support of modern software design patterns. Ready-to-use project skeletons can be employed to accelerate the development process, while at the same time taking care of the implementation of best practices in software engineering. In this work, we revisit best practices in software engineering and review existing project skeletons. Special emphasis is given on the realization of best practices. Finally, we present a new project skeleton for scientific writing in "Image missing", which takes care of the attainment of best practices, adapted for being used in academic publications.

An Extensible Compiler for Implementing Software Design Patterns as Concise Language Constructs

Design patterns are generic solutions to common programming problems. Design patterns represent a typical example of design reuse. However, implementing design patterns can lead to several problems, such as programming overhead and traceability. Existing research introduced several approaches to alleviate the implementation issues of design patterns. Nevertheless, existing approaches pose different implementation restrictions and require programmers to be aware of how design patterns should be implemented. Such approaches make the source code more prone to faults and defects. In addition, existing design pattern implementation approaches limit programmers to apply specific scenarios of design patterns (e.g. class-level), while other approaches require scattering implementation code snippets throughout the program. Such restrictions negatively impact understanding, tracing, or reusing design patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to support the implementation of software design patterns as an extensible Java compiler. Our approach allows developers to use concise, easy-to-use language constructs to apply design patterns in their code. In addition, our approach allows the application of design patterns in different scenarios. We illustrate our approach using three commonly used design patterns, namely Singleton, Observer and Decorator. We show, through illustrative examples, how our design pattern constructs can significantly simplify implementing design patterns in a flexible, reusable and traceable manner. Moreover, our design pattern constructs allow class-level and instance-level implementations of design patterns.

On the Usability of Object-Oriented Design Patterns for a Better Software Quality

Software design patterns incarnate expert knowledge distilled from the practical experience in object-oriented design, in a compact and reusable form. The article presents a quantitative study of the usability of the object-oriented software design patterns (known as Gang of Four patterns) applied for improving the testability, maintainability, extendibility, readability, reliability, and performance efficiency of software applications. We received 82 usable responses from software professionals in Bulgaria, with 65 of them addressing both the usability and recognition of each one of the Gang of Four patterns, together with their impact on important software quality characteristics. As well, we studied the approach of each software developer in choosing a particular design pattern to use in order to solve a problem. We found statistically significant differences between the most recognized and most useful patterns and between the most unrecognized and most useless patterns, split into creational, structural, and behavioral groups.