Towards pattern-based design recovery

ABSTRACT

A method and a corresponding tool is described which assist design recovery and program understanding by recognising instances of design patterns semi-automatically. The approach taken is specifically designed to overcome the existing scalability problems caused by many design and implementation variants of design pattern instances. Our approach is based on a new recognition algorithm which works incrementally rather than trying to analyse a possibly large software system in one pass without any human intervention. The new algorithm exploits domain and context knowledge given by a reverse engineer and by a special underlying data structure, namely a special form of an annotated abstract syntax graph. A comparative and quantitative evaluation of applying the approach to the Java AWT and JGL libraries is also given.

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Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software post-development issues

      • Software reverse engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • General programming languages

      • Language features

        • Modules / packages

        • Patterns

  • Software organization and properties

    • Software system structures

      • Distributed systems organizing principles

        • Client-server architectures

      • Software architectures