Dynamic analysis and design pattern detection in Java programs

Identifying design patterns within an existing software system can support understandability and reuse of the system's core functionality. In this context, incorporating behavioral features into the design pattern recovery would enhance the scalability of the process. The main advantage of the new approach in this paper over the existing approaches is incorporating dynamic analysis and feature localization in source code. This allows us to perform a goal-driven design pattern detection and focus ourselves on patterns that implement specific software functionality, as opposed to conducting a general pattern detection which is susceptible to high complexity problem. Using a new pattern description language and a matching process we identify the instances of these patterns within the obtained classes and interactions. We use a two-phase matching process: i) an approximate matching of class attributes generates a list of candidate patterns; and ii) a structural matching of classes identifies exact matched patterns. One target application domain can be software product line which emphasizes on reusing core software artifacts to construct a reference architecture for several similar products. Finally, we present the result of a case study.