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Improving design-pattern identification: a new approach and an exploratory study

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Abstract

The identification of occurrences of design patterns in programs can help maintainers to understand the program design and implementation. It can also help them to make informed changes. Current identification approaches are limited to complete occurrences, are time- and resource-consuming, and lead to many false positives. We propose to combine a structural and a numerical approach to improve the identification of complete and incomplete occurrences of design patterns. We develop a structural approach using explanation-based constraint programming and we enhance this approach using experimentally built numerical signatures. We show that the use of numerical signatures improves the identification of complete and incomplete occurrences in terms of performance and precision.

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Notes

  1. We consider the concept of class extensively, including abstract classes, and interfaces.

  2. See www.ptidej.net/downloads/pmart/.

  3. We excluded local classes, i.e. classes defined in methods, because of their rarity.

  4. The ratio of misclassified false positives is (number of counter-examples in σ classified as playing a role)/(number of counter-examples in σ).

  5. The error is computed as (number of examples in σ classified as playing a role)/(size of σ).

  6. http://www.ptidej.org/downloads/experiments/SQJ09/.

  7. http://www.ptidej.net/downloads/pmart/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank James Bieman, Greg Straw, Huxia Wang, P. Willard, and Roger T. Alexander (2003) for kindly sharing their data. We are grateful to our students, Saliha Bouden, Janice Ka-Yee Ng, Nawfal Chraibi, Duc-Loc Huynh, and Taleb Ikbal, who helped in the creation of the repository. We are indebt with Neil Stewart for his kind helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ptidej Team, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

  2. GEODES, DIRO, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Jean-Yves Guyomarc’h & Houari Sahraoui

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  1. Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc
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  2. Jean-Yves Guyomarc’h
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  3. Houari Sahraoui
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Correspondence to Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc.

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Guéhéneuc, YG., Guyomarc’h, JY. & Sahraoui, H. Improving design-pattern identification: a new approach and an exploratory study. Software Qual J 18, 145–174 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-009-9082-y

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