Hierarchical Clustering Based Design Patterns Identification

Design patterns have attracted significant attention in software engineering in the last period. An important reason behind this is that design patterns are potentially useful in both development of new, and comprehension of existing object-oriented design, especially for large legacy systems without sufficient documentation. That is why the problem of design patterns identification is very important. Automating the detection of design pattern instances could be of significant help to the process of reverse engineering large software systems. In this paper we aim at introducing a search based approach for identifying instances of design patterns in a software system. An experimental evaluation of our approach is also provided.