Clustering and lexical information support for the recovery of design pattern in source code

We propose an approach that leverages lexical information and fuzzy clustering to reduce the number of the design pattern instances that existing approaches based on structural information (i.e., navigating the dependencies among software elements) erroneously recover in source code. To assess the effectiveness of the techniques, we present the results of a case study conducted on four open source software systems implemented in java. The data analysis indicates that the use of lexical information and fuzzy clustering improves the correctness of the results achieved by existing design pattern recovery approaches based on structural information, while preserving the number of design pattern instances correctly identified.