It's a quad D flip-flop. It's used to keep data bits at the output until a clock. Whatever you put at the input won't affect the output until a clock pulse is sent. When that happens all you had at the output BEFORE will be replaced with what it was a the input when the clock was sent.
I don't know why they use it, if you had a circuit you can post it so we can see it and think the application of the IC on that circuit. Maybe the output ports of the MCu are insufficient and they keep data in the IC and use the same pins to do another thing.
It comes to my mind that it's used as buffer, but there are ICs that do the same with less pins so I don't really know the reason.
Hope it helped you.