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Why?

Applying well-known design patterns improves the quality (and structure) of the designed software.

How?

Design patterns are documented solutions to frequently encountered problems or challenges in software engineering. They incorporate good software engineering principles. You should have, an overview and active knowledge of the available patterns. Or acquire further knowledge by asking an expert for hints or suggestions of patterns for a particular software engineering task and figuring out how to apply it in your context/software.

Ingredients

• An overview of patterns (book or websites).
• Time to absorb and understand patterns.
• A willingness to improve the quality of the designed software.
• Making your use of the pattern explicit in the software documentation and/or the source code itself

In practice

The book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object- Oriented Software is regarded as the ‘bible’ of design patterns and is still widely used in corporate software engineering practice. However, there are many other, more up-to-date, books and online resources.

Phase(s) of use

In the following project phase(s) design pattern research can be used:

• Design
• Realisation