Detection of Diverse Design Pattern Variants

Abstract

We propose a method for automatic detection of occurrences of design patterns. We also describe its proof-of-concept implementation and the results of comparative experiments with other tools. The method presented here is able to detect many nonstandard implementation variants of design patterns, while its efficiency is comparable to other state-of-the-art detection tools. Moreover, the method is highly customizable because an analyst can introduce a new pattern retrieval query or modify an existing one and then repeat the detection using the results of earlier source code analysis stored in a relational database.