Detecting Design Patterns As Described By An Explicit Specification (S)

Abstract

Teaching design patterns in higher education enhances coding skills and improves software quality. However, manually correcting their work and detecting whether the students have correctly implemented the design patterns is timeconsuming and would benefit from automated tools. There exist tools that can automatically detect design patterns in code. However, these tools rarely provide an explicit specification of what each pattern should look like. As a consequence, these tools are not usable in an educational environment. When using a tool to detect design patterns in an educational environment, there are several important considerations to keep in mind. Firstly, the tool should use an explicit specification of each design pattern. Secondly, as a teacher, you should be able to adjust the specifications. Third, the tool should be accurate, meaning it should produce few to no false positives or false negatives when identifying patterns in the students' code. Finally, the tool should do this computationally efficiently. In this article, we present a new tool for detecting design patterns in code. Our tool is capable of recognizing 20 of the most commonly used design patterns, including those described by the 'Gang of Four'.