Design pattern recovery through visual language parsing and source code analysis

In this paper we propose an approach for recovering structural design patterns from object-oriented source code. The recovery process 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 exploiting a parsing technique used for visual language recognition. Then, the identified candidate patterns are validated by a fine-grained source code analysis phase. The recognition process is supported by a tool, namely design pattern recovery environment, which allowed us to assess the retrieval effectiveness of the proposed approach on six public-domain programs and libraries.