Design patterns: a survey on their micro‐structures

Abstract

SUMMARY Design patterns play a significant role in reverse engineering by providing information not only on how but also on why a solution has been implemented in a specific way because of their semantics. The application of design patterns leads to their personalization to a specific context, hence to the generation of variants. This makes their recognition a challenging task, which may be addressed through the understanding and detection of the micro‐structures design patterns are made of. This is very useful for the detection as well as for the application of design patterns. The principal aim of this paper is to present a survey on these micro‐structures and a comparison among them in the perspective of reverse engineering. Because of their less complex structure and behavior, as well as closer link to the source code, the recognition of these micro‐structures may be automated, which can be considered a step towards the automatic recognition of the more complex design patterns. In this paper, we consider four of the most significant types of micro‐structures: elemental design patterns, clues, sub‐patterns, and micro patterns. To analyze the role of the micro‐structures in the design pattern detection process, we make a comparison among these four types of micro‐structures and among the micro‐structures of various types in order to identify the relations among them. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

From Sub-patterns to Patterns: An Approach to the Detection of Structural Design Pattern Instances by Subgraph Mining and Merging

“…Each feature type is assigned to one of the multiple search techniques that is best fitting for its detection. On the other hand, Arcelli Fontana et al introduce microstructures which are regarded as the building blocks of design patterns [6] [7]. They evaluate whether the detection of these building blocks is relevant for the detection of occurrences of the design patterns.…”

“…Therefore, our approach detects the sub-patterns first and then tries to merge these sub-patterns into all possible patterns. Moreover, the sub-patterns defined in this paper are different from the micro-structures defined in [6] and [7], or meta-patterns in [8], which contain both structural and behavioral features. Because behavioral features change frequently and are hard to detect, the sub-patterns presented in this paper contain only classes and the relationships between them.…”

A comprehensive approach to the recovery of design pattern instances based on sub-patterns and method signatures

“…Meanwhile, Elemental Design Patterns (Smith, 2002) place themselves on a coarser-grained level of detail concentrating on the behavioral aspects, and provide too general hints for design pattern detection. On the other hand, the sub-patterns, given by Fontana et al (2011a), are defined on top of some others and therefore would become too complicated to deal with. Concerning metapatterns introduced by Posnett et al (2010), the GoF design patterns are not always the instances of metapatterns or combinations of multiple metapatterns.…”

“…Each feature type is assigned to one of the multiple search techniques that is best fitting for its detection. On the other hand, Fontana et al introduce four types of microtructures, i.e., elemental design patterns, design pattern clues, micro patterns and sub-patterns, which are regarded as the building blocks of design patterns (Fontana et al, 2011a(Fontana et al, , 2011b. They evaluate whether the detection of these building blocks is relevant for the detection of occurrences of the design patterns.…”

A Context-Aware Style of Software Design

“…Code smell detectors are implemented as extensions of the Micro-Structures Detector (MSD) MARPLE module. Micro-structures [6] can be informally defined as facts or binary relations about code elements that can be consistently detected by static analysis. A simple example of micro-structure is whether a class is declared abstract.…”