DESIGN PATTERNS DETECTION TOOL

Abstract

Design patterns represent an important evolutionary step in software abstraction and reuse. Design patterns are solutions to general software development problems. One interesting area in this field is the automatic detection of design pattern in existing code. This could be of significant help to the process of reverse engineering software systems. Thus, the main objective of this research is to create a tool that detects design patterns. This involves studying the unique characteristics (rules) of each of the design patterns in order to detect them and built these rules into the tool. The tool also produces visualization of the detected patterns in terms of UML class diagram. The scope of this study is to detect design patterns that fall under the Structural category. These patterns are Adapter, Bridge, Composite, Decorator, Façade, Flyweight, and Proxy. Besides, it is focusing on detecting design patterns in Java code. This study resulted in a tool called Design Pattern Detection and Visualization (DPDV). DPDV accepts Java files as inputs from users. It then extracts the static and structural relationships between classes and objects that existed in the Java code. The tool uses the Reflection technique in order to do that. The tool then arranges the extracted information in a data structure defined as a class. After that, the tool examines the extracted information and compared them with the rules of each of the design patterns to determine the possible design pattern that existed in the Java code. The pattern can be detected since each structural pattern has a unique structure that differentiates it from other structural patterns. The tool achieved a detection/accuracy rate that exceeded 85% that indicates that it is successful. ii The analysis, design, implementation and testing of DPDV, its strengths and weaknesses are also discussed in this study. As a conclusion, this study has achieved its objectives. This will definitely benefit similar future study and developers of such a system.