Towards pattern-based design recovery

Jörg Niere, Wilhelm Schäfer, Jörg P. Wadsack, Lothar Wendehals, Jim Welsh

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.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Niere-al:ICSE02,
  author    = {J{\"{o}}rg Niere and
               Wilhelm Sch{\"{a}}fer and
               J{\"{o}}rg P. Wadsack and
               Lothar Wendehals and
               Jim Welsh},
  title     = {Towards pattern-based design recovery},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  pages     = {338--348},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2002},
}

Towards pattern-based design recovery

Abstract

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