Identifying Software Complexity Topics with Latent Dirichlet Allocation on Design Patterns

Abstract

The scientific literature has paid limited attention to studying software complexity subjects from the design point of view. There is a significant number of papers that study software complexity in relation with maintenance, refactoring, source code changes and that establish metrics for measuring software complexity. This paper compares design patterns and software complexity in order to identify trends of research in the software complexity area. For this purpose, we assess the strengths and weaknesses of software complexity scientific articles through the lens of design patterns. We have reviewed 1068 papers via latent Dirichlet allocation technique (LDA) for our work. We found that existing software complexity paths disproportionate emphasis in how software complexity could benefit from design patterns instead on how contributions to design patterns can benefit from software complexity.