Towards pattern-based design recovery

• Published in: Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 338 - 348
• Main Authors: Niere, Jörg, Schäfer, Wilhelm, Wadsack, Jörg P., Wendehals, Lothar, Welsh, Jim
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 01.01.2002
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Exact sciences and technology; Software; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software post-development issues > Software reverse engineering; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > General programming languages > Language features > Modules > packages; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > General programming languages > Language features > Patterns; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software system structures > Distributed systems organizing principles > Client-server architectures; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software system structures > Software architectures; Software engineering; Software architecture; JAVA language; Scalability; Large system; Unified modelling language; Pattern recovery; Pattern recognition; Data structure; Syntax
• ISBN: 158113472X; 9781581134728
• ISSN: 0270-5257
• DOI: 10.1145/581339.581382

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.