An Eclipse Plug-in for Design Pattern Recovery

Abstract. Design patterns are not only beneficial to the forward engineering process but they also help typical reverse engineering activities such as design recovery and program understanding. Indeed, conspicuous insight on the software structure and its internal characteristics are provided by design patterns recovered from source code. In this paper, we present an Eclipse plug-in implementing a reverse engineering tool able to detect pattern instances in Java programs. The plug-in exploits a two phase approach for the recovery of structural design patterns. In the first phase a set of candidate is identified by a visual language parser which considers the design structure only, whereas the second phase validates the candidates through a source code analysis. Moreover, the presented tool integrates reporting facilities and a graphical representation using UML class diagram on the recovered pattern instances