A Framework of Concepts for Representing Object-Oriented Design & Design Patterns

Object-oriented design patterns are expert designer intuition made explicit. They allow the designer to be more explicit about design decisions in an early stage. A gentle, formal approach of the inherently informal patterns opens doors to advanced tool support. This includes automatic code generation, but also automatic design generation and keeping the design consistent with the underlying ideas. Creating a formalization which should be as informal as possible is a challenging task. This was one of the goals of our research. Also, design patterns cannot be put into practice without a proper framework to represent designs in general. This thesis introduces a methodology to formalize design patterns, in the context of tool support for object-oriented design. The reader is presented the Extended Fragment Model. This is another approach to constraint management and pattern modeling: it breaks down a pattern into smaller entities each responsible for managing their own constraints. In or..