The Role of Design Pattern Decomposition in Reverse Engineering Tools

The decomposition of design patterns into simpler elements may reduce significantly the creation of variants in forward engineering, while it increases the possibility of identifying applied patterns in reverse engineering. Key questions raise here: what should be design patterns decomposed in? How to recognize the application of design patterns by identifying their components? Currently, there are few forward and reverse engineering tools that exploit the decomposition of design patterns (e.g., FUJABA, SPQR). FUJABA is a forward and reverse engineering tool introducing sub-patterns to reduce the dimension of the design pattern catalog and the complexity of the elements searched in the source code, as well as to improve the detection algorithm. SPQR is an automatic tool for design pattern recognition, which introduces an elemental design patterns (EDPs) catalog and a rule set based on sigma-calculus through which EDPs are defined and composed into design patterns. In this position paper we aim at focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of decomposing design patterns in sib-components and at introducing our research interests and projects related to this issue.