Design Pattern Recovery

The use of design patterns in a software system can provide strong indications about the rationale behind the system’s design. As a result, automating the detection of design pattern instances could be of significant help to the process of reverse engineering large software systems.

We propose an Object Oriented design pattern recovery approach which makes use of a design pattern library, expressed in terms of visual grammars, and based on a visual language parsing technique. The pattern recovery is organized in two phases. In the first phase, the design pattern instances are identified at a coarse-grained level by considering the design structure only and using a visual language parsing technique. Then, the identified candidate patterns are validated by a fine-grained source code analysis phase.

The pattern recognition process is performed by a tool, namely DPR (Design Pattern Recovery).

Program	Version	Platform	Size	Download
Design Pattern Recovery tool	1.4a	Windows	685 KB	Download

J2SE 1.6.0 SDK or successive versions.

Unzip the downloaded rar file into any directory of your disk.

Execute the file run.bat inside the main directory DesignPatternRecovery.

Click the Open directory button and choose the source code base directory.
Run the Browse button using the sequence:

0

1

2

It is possible to change extraction options (File > Options) to enable/disable negative criteria and delegation-extend checks. For more information about checks, see help in the Options dialog.

Run the Extraction button to extract candidate patterns.
Run the Validate button to execute source-code analysis.
Click the Results button to show design pattern recovery results into the default browser.
To repeat the process with different options goto step 3.