Automatically discovering design patterns and assessing concern separations for applications

  • Authors:
  • Giuseppe Pappalardo;Emiliano Tramontana

  • Affiliations:
  • Università di Catania;Università di Catania

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

In this paper we present a tool that assists in the automated analysis of a Java application, aimed at two purposes: (i) identifying class structure and, within this, micro-architectures that conform to known design patterns; (ii) providing visual representations of classes, concerns and their relationships. This affords a more abstract view of the analysed application, letting its structure emerge more clearly and its components be separately understood. As a result, it becomes easier for developers to assess whether well-known desirable characteristics, notably those favouring modularity and concern separation, or rather bad design choices, have been incorporated into the application.The proposed approach can be helpful both within the undertaking of a new development effort, and reverse engineering of an existing application in view of its evolution.