Towards a Model-driven Approach for Reverse Engineering Design Patterns

The size and complexity of software systems is rapidly increasing. Meanwhile, the ability to understand and maintain such systems is decreasing almost as fast. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) promotes the notion of modeling to cope with software complexity; in this paper we report on our research that utilizes ontological modeling for understanding complex software systems. We focus the discussion on recovering design pattern information from source code. We thus argue that an effective recovery approach needs to utilize semantic reasoning to properly match an ontological representation of both: conceptual source code knowledge and design pattern descriptions. Since design patterns can take different forms when implemented in code, we argue that hardcoding their descriptions limits the flexibility and usability of a detection mechanism.