Design recovery by automated search for structural design patterns in object-oriented software

Abstract

The object-oriented design community has recently begun to collect so-called design patterns: cliches plus hints to their recommended use in software c onstruction. The structural design patterns Adapter, Bridge, Composite, Decorator, and Proxy represent packaged p r oblem context solution properties descriptions to common problems in object-oriented design. Localizing instances of these patterns in existing software p r o duced without explicit use of patterns can improve the maintainability of software. In our approach, called the Pat system, design information is extracted directly from C ++ header les and stored i n a r epository. The patterns are expressed a s Prolog rules and the design information is translated into facts. A single Prolog query is then used t o s e arch for all patterns. We examined four applications, including the popular class libraries zApp and LEDA, with Pat. With some restrictions all pattern instances are found; the precision is about 40 percent. Since manual ltering of the output is relatively easy, we consider Pat a useful tool for discovering or recovering design information.

Using Design Pattern Clues to Improve the Precision of Design Pattern Detection Tools.

“…The Pat system [KP96] transforms C++ source code into PROLOG facts and matches them against pattern definitions given as PROLOG statements. The approach is based on first-order logic and constraint solving techniques.…”

Relationship between design patterns defects and crosscutting concern scattering degree: an empirical study

“…We chose this tool due to its availability, its ability to detect a reasonable range of different design patterns, and its ability to analyse the three software systems under study. There are several other design pattern detection approaches available in literature [8,16,20,22], however no tool is currently available for these approaches.…”

Recovering business processes from business applications

“…The well known design patterns applied in OO source code are presented by Gamma et al [23.]. The techniques for recovering design patterns ease program understanding and designs [29][28] [6]. Antoniol et al [6] propose a multi-tag reduction strategy that recovers design patterns from OO source code using software metrics and structural properties.…”

“…Antoniol et al [6] propose a multi-tag reduction strategy that recovers design patterns from OO source code using software metrics and structural properties. Krämer et al [29] develop a system, called Pat, to recover design pattern instances through searching the design pattern repository and software design information. Keller et al [28] represent the source code in UML and use queries to recognize design patterns from source code.…”