Design Pattern Detection by Using Meta Patterns

Special Section on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering

Shinpei HAYASHI, Presently, NTT COMWARE CORPORATION">Junya KATADA, Ryota SAKAMOTO, The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers">Takashi KOBAYASHI, The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers">Motoshi SAEKI

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Keywords: design patterns, program understanding, meta patterns, dynamic analysis, Prolog

JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

2008 Volume E91.D Issue 4 Pages 933-944

DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/ietisy/e91-d.4.933

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Abstract

One of the approaches to improve program understanding is to extract what kinds of design pattern are used in existing object-oriented software. This paper proposes a technique for efficiently and accurately detecting occurrences of design patterns included in source codes. We use both static and dynamic analyses to achieve the detection with high accuracy. Moreover, to reduce computation and maintenance costs, detection conditions are hierarchically specified based on Pree's meta patterns as common structures of design patterns. The usage of Prolog to represent the detection conditions enables us to easily add and modify them. Finally, we have implemented an automated tool as an Eclipse plug-in and conducted experiments with Java programs. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.

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