Which design best practices should be taken care of?

In the past, software metrics were used to express the compliance of source code with object‐oriented design aspects. Nevertheless, it has been found out that metrics are too vague for dealing with the complexity of driving concrete design improvements and the idea of identifying code or design smells in source code has been established. Despite good progress in localising design flaws based on the identification of design smells, these design smells are still too fine‐grained to conclude a design assessment. Consequently, we follow the idea of measuring and assessing the compliance of the source code with object‐oriented design principles by means of design best practices. Design best practices naturally have a different importance. To find out about a proper importance, we decided to conduct a survey to gather data that allow a more differentiated view of the importance of for Java‐related design best practices.