Design patterns are object oriented software design practices for solving common design problems and they affect software quality. In this study, we investigate the relationship of design patterns and software defects in a number of open source software projects. Design pattern instances are extracted from the source code repository of these open source software projects. Software defect metrics are extracted from the bug tracking systems of these projects. Using correlation and regression analysis on extracted data, we examine the relationship between design patterns and software defects. Our findings indicate that there is little correlation between the total number of design pattern instances and the number of defects. However, our regression analysis reveals that individual design pattern instances as a group have strong influences on the number of defects. Furthermore, we find that the number of design pattern instances is positively correlated to defect priority. Individual design pattern instances may have positive or negative impacts on defect priority.
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