A new approach for pattern problem detection

Abstract

Despite their advantages in design quality improvement and rapid software development, design patterns remain difficult to reuse for inexperienced designers. The main difficulty consists in how to recognize the applicability of an appropriate design pattern for a particular application. Design problems can be found in a design with different shapes, unfortunately, often through poor solutions. To deal with this situation, we propose an approach that recognizes pattern problems in a design and that assists in transforming them into their corresponding design patterns. Our approach adapts an XML document retrieval technique to detect the situation necessitating a pattern usage. Unlike current approaches, ours accounts for both the structural and semantic aspects of a pattern problem. In addition, it tolerates design alterations of pattern problems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.