Uma abordagem para detecção de padrões emergentes.

Abstract

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