A new method for detecting various variants of GoF design patterns using conceptual signatures

Abstract

Software design patterns are well-known solutions for solving commonly occurring problems in software design. Detecting design patterns used in the code can help to understand the structure and behavior of the software, evaluate the quality of the software, and trace important design decisions. To develop and maintain a software system, we need sufficient knowledge of design decisions and software implementation processes. However, the acquisition of knowledge related to design patterns used in complex software systems is a challenging, time-consuming, and costly task. Therefore, using a suitable method to detect the design patterns used in the code reduces software development and maintenance costs. In this paper, we proposed a new method based on conceptual signatures to improve the accuracy of design pattern detection. So we used the conceptual signatures based on the purpose of patterns to detect the patterns' instances that conform to the standard structure of patterns, and cover more instances of patterns' variants and implementation versions of the patterns and improve the accuracy of pattern detection. The proposed method is a specific process in two main phases. In the first phase, the conceptual signature and detection formula for each pattern is determined manually. Then in the second phase, each pattern in the code is detected in a semi-automatic process using the conceptual signature and pattern detection formula. To implement the proposed method, we focused on GoF design patterns and their variants. We evaluated the accuracy of our proposed method on five open-source projects, namely, Junit v3.7, JHotDraw v5.1, QuickUML 2001, JRefactory v2.6.24, and MapperXML v1.9.7. Also, we performed our experiments on a set of source codes containing the instances of GoF design patterns' variants for a comprehensive and fair evaluation. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed method has improved the accuracy of design pattern detection in the code.

A Feature-Based Method for Detecting Design Patterns in Source Code

“…Miscellaneous approaches: There are several approaches that cannot be categorized under one of the categories mentioned above, such as data mining [78] and concept analysis [12,79]. These approaches are used basically to improve the results of other approaches.…”

“…Different design pattern detection methods have tried to address the problem of design pattern variants. One of the recent works is the method proposed in [12], which covers the design pattern variants by determining the necessity of the roles and their relations in the pattern's structure. Therefore, all the design pattern instances that only have the necessary roles and relations are considered as candidate instances.…”

“…Thus far, several detection methods with different approaches have been claimed to be successful in detecting design pattern variants [3,9,12,13]. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, none of these methods have provided detailed information about the variants covered or detected.…”