DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7970476

Software system development is a challenging task. Pattern-based development has been effectively employed to simplify and accelerate the development of high-quality systems. In general, a pattern is described as a context-specific solution to a recurrent problem. They consequently offer an important platform for experience sharing and reuse.

The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive survey of the literature reporting findings from diverse research communities and domains with regard to pattern concept in software engineering.

We conducted a systematic literature review based on three digital libraries and following a standard methodology.

The search identified 129 relevant papers. We derived a taxonomy from the reviewed studies. This taxonomy provides researchers with a structured review of the state-of-the-art in patterns in the software engineering field, which may help new researchers in the field position their work and open a gateway to new pattern-based approaches. We used the proposed taxonomy to classify and analyze primary studies to offer quantitative and qualitative results. In order to help researchers consolidate their pattern-based approaches, recommendations for future directions are also given.

Different communities in the field of software engineering use the pattern concept. Pattern-based approaches are mature in some areas but are just getting started in others. The study recommends standardizing pattern descriptions and establishing explicit conventions for pattern type definitions. The study proposes to reinforce the research field with feedback and success stories on the use of patterns in an industrial context.

In this folder, we provide the assets necessary to replicate this study and the obtained results:

• Primary Studies: A folder that contains reference files (bibtex) describing the selected primary studies. The primary studies are organized by library, and the papers resulting from the snowballing are also provided. The number of papers collected from each library is mentioned.
• Related Survey: A reference file (bibtex) containing information about the studies surveying the concept of patterns in the software engineering field.
• Search string per database : A file describing the employed search string per database.
• Raw data: A file that contains the correspondence between the paper ID used in the classification and the reference defined in the bibtex file. In addition, it contains raw data extracted from the primary studies.
• Results: A folder that contains the obtained results. This folder includes: (i) the taxonomy derived from this study; (ii) the classification of the primary studies with respect to the taxonomy (the classification for each sub-category of the taxonomy); (iii) the cross-analysis; and (iv) the figures that synthesize the obtained analysis results.