Design Patterns in Practice from the Point of View of Developers

Design patterns are a relevant research topic that has been empirically investigated by academia in the last years. However, there is still a gap in the perception of the use of design patterns in practice. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by analyzing a real Brazilian scenario. Considering that Belo Horizonte is one of the main Brazilian cities in the context of software development, we decide to carry out a survey with 58 active developers from this city. The results exhibited in this paper bring a real perception of the use of design patterns in a relevant center of software development. In this survey, we have identified that design patterns are not widely disseminated in the local industry since 40% of the participants claimed do not frequently make use of them. We have also found that the lack of use of design patterns is mainly associated with the lack of knowledge of these solutions by the developers besides the absence of incentives from the companies. Moreover, we discussed some benefits pointed out by the participants and listed the design patterns most used and less used by the developers.