JOB, R. S.; http://lattes.cnpq.br/8683569567932429; JOB, Ricardo de Sousa.
Resumo:
Design Patterns are Consolidated solutions to recurring software design problems. They
are widely used in object-oriented software design, as communication device of well known
solutions within development teams. It is important that the software designer detects and
identifies design patterns in a code base, to understand the relationships between classes,
provide useful suggestions for the understanding and evolution of the system. For automatic
detection of patterns there are basically two techniques: static and dynamic analysis. On the
first step, relations and structural collaborations are extracted. In the second step, the program
execution is monitored, tracking the selected set of patterns in the first step to identify
which patterns behave as expected. However, the current detection techniques are limited to
restrictive structural analysis, omitting cases where the behavior of a pattem is presente, even
if not follow the structural organization provided in the literature. We call emerging patterns
when the behavior of a given pattern is present, even if some code's region presents a free
structure. For example, the essence of the Singleton design pattern is present in any given
class when it has only a single instance during the execution of a program, even without
syntactic restriction for this to be possible; that is, the Singleton pattern emerged from this
program element behavior. When developers are assisted in detecting design situations like
this, they can enhance their knowledge about the consequences of their decisions, as well
as providing the explicit structure of the pattern, facilitating the documentation and communication
of the project. This paper explores the concept of emerging patterns through the
following contributions: (i) a systematic review of automatic detection approaches of design
patterns, (ii) concepts of emerging patterns for several well-known design patterns, (iii)
a proposal for semi-automatic detection approach of emerging patterns and (iv) its use for
an analysis of existing detection tools about tíieir ability to identify emerging patterns in an
open-source Java project