Searching design patterns in source code

Maintenance is a time consuming activity within software development and it requires a good understanding of the system in question. It is hard or even impossible to understand poorly documented legacy systems. Nevertheless, developers try to understand unknown object oriented systems by analysing the source code to recover the architecture of the system, which is a hard task since the dependencies between the classes cannot be recovered good enough. Here, the knowledge about design patterns can help developers to understand the underlying architecture faster. We analysed existing pattern search approaches and compared them by their recall and precision values, metrics out of the information retrieval domain. As a result we developed own pattern search algorithms for the 23 design pattern described by Gamma et al. (1995). This fast abstract briefly explains the basics of our pattern search and describes first results of the search algorithms developed as a Java plug-in for the Together IDE. This work was funded by the BMBF (2004) and is part of the InPULSE (2004) project.