ChatGPT Prompt Patterns for Improving Code Quality, Refactoring, Requirements Elicitation, and Software Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces prompt design patterns for large language models to enhance various software engineering tasks, including code quality, refactoring, requirements gathering, and system design, providing a structured catalog and practical examples.

Contribution

It offers a novel catalog of prompt patterns for software engineering tasks and demonstrates their application to improve LLM-assisted development processes.

Findings

Catalog of prompt patterns for software engineering

Improved code quality and refactoring using prompts

Enhanced requirements elicitation and system design

Abstract

This paper presents prompt design techniques for software engineering, in the form of patterns, to solve common problems when using large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT to automate common software engineering activities, such as ensuring code is decoupled from third-party libraries and simulating a web application API before it is implemented. This paper provides two contributions to research on using LLMs for software engineering. First, it provides a catalog of patterns for software engineering that classifies patterns according to the types of problems they solve. Second, it explores several prompt patterns that have been applied to improve requirements elicitation, rapid prototyping, code quality, refactoring, and system design.