Joining Forces for Higher Precision and Recall of Design Pattern Detection

Automated design pattern detection (DPD) is a challenging reengineering task that has been shown to require combination of complex structural and behavioural analyses for good results. Still, the detection quality (precision and recall) of existing tools has so far been insufficient to make DPD integral part of current IDEs and development practices. In this paper we present a novel approach and a related tool, DPJF. For all implemented pattern detectors and all projects used for evaluation, DPJF provides competitive performance while achieving the best recall of all evaluated tools (with a median of 89%) and 100% precision. These results lay the basis for routine application of DPD in program comprehension and software quality assesment. The high detection quality is achieved by a well-balanced combination of structural and behavioural analysis techniques whereas the good performance is achieved by emprically validated simplifications of the individual techniques.

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