Recovering design patterns to support program comprehension

This paper presents a design pattern directed software clustering approach to support program comprehension. First, the code is parsed to recover the design pattern information. Second, the code is clustered considering design patterns. Classes/interfaces are grouped into clusters based on their inter-role relationship of design patterns. Finally, a cluster-level view of the original code is constructed to support understanding the code. A prototype tool TasteJ was implemented to support the automation of proposed approach. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach. The experimental results show that the approach is encouraging and promising.

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