Architecture and Design Pattern Discovery Techniques – A Review.pdf

Architecture and Design Pattern Discovery Techniques – A Review Jing Dong, Yajing Zhao, Tu Peng Department of Computer Science University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083, USA {jdong,yxz045100,txp051000}@ Abstract Architecture and design patterns, as demonstrated solutions to recurring problems, have proved practically important and useful in the process of software development. They have been extensively applied in industry. Discovering the instances of architecture and design patterns from the source code of software systems can assist the understanding of the systems and the process of re-engineering. More importantly, it also helps to trace back to the original architecture and design decisions, which are typically missing for legacy systems. This paper presents a review on current techniques and tools for discovering architecture and design patterns from object-oriented systems. We classify different approaches and analyze their results. We also discuss the disparity of the discovery results from different approaches and analyze possible reasons with some insight. 1. Introduction Architecture and design patterns [10][6][16] have been widely adopted by software industry. Software developers become routinely applying architecture and design patterns to solve their problems. When patterns are applied and implemented in a system, however, the pattern-related information is generally no longer available in the source code. It is hard to trace such architectural design information in source code. Recovering pattern instances from system source code can greatly help to understand the systems and change them in the future. It also helps to trace back to the original architectural design decisions which are generally lost in legacy systems. Many existing techniques and tools can help recover the architecture and design from system source code. These reverse engineering tools become the foundation for architecture and des