Do Professional Developers Benefit from Design Pattern Documentation? A Replication in the Context of Source Code Comprehension

We present the results of a differentiated replication conducted with professional developers to assess whether the presence and the kind of documentation for the solutions or instances of design patterns affect source code comprehension. The participants were divided into three groups and asked to comprehend a chunk of the JHot- Draw source code. Depending on the group, each participant was or not provided with the graphical and textual representations of the design pattern instances implemented within that source code. In the case of graphically documented instances, we used UML class diagrams, while textually documented instances are reported as comment in the source code. The results revealed that participants provided with the documentation of the instances achieved a significantly better comprehension than the participants with source code alone. The effect of the kind of documentation is not statistically significant.