What Do We Know about the Tools of Detecting Design Patterns?

Context: Design patterns are successful reusable solutions to recurring problems within given contexts in software design. Detecting instances of design patterns and their variants favor the activities of software design development and maintenance. Currently, several developed tools are available to support the detection of design patterns and their variants. Objective: To investigate what evidence is available about how the design patterns are detected effectively and what the tools we can have to perform the detection extensively and efficiently. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study, searching the literature from 2006 to 2018 to identify relevant primary studies about the design patterns detection tools. And then we categorized these studies according to the forms of study employed. Results: From 4 common digital libraries, we identified 195 candidate papers. After applying our inclusion/exclusion criteria resulted in a final set of 27 papers. Conclusion: We investigated the design pattern detection tools in the past decade and generated lessons learnt from the aspects of development language, analysis type, the form of expression of source code and design pattern, detection methods, etc. Moreover, we could understand the tools that have ability to detect variants, and then discover the characteristics of them, which could bring new inspiration to solve variants problems.