Impact of the visitor pattern on program comprehension and maintenance

In the software engineering literature, many works claim that the use of design patterns improves the comprehensibility of programs and, more generally, their maintainability. Yet, little work attempted to study the impact of design patterns on the developers' tasks of program comprehension and modification. We design and perform an experiment to collect data on the impact of the Visitor pattern on comprehension and modification tasks with class diagrams. We use an eye-tracker to register saccades and fixations, the latter representing the focus of the developers' attention. Collected data show that the Visitor pattern plays a role in maintenance tasks: class diagrams with its canonical representation requires less efforts from developers.