A Two Phase Approach to Design Pattern Recovery

In this paper we present a two phase approach to the recovery of structural design pattern. In the first phase, the design pattern instances are identified at a course-grained level by considering the design structure only and using a visual language parsing technique. Then, the identified candidate patterns are validated by a fine-grained source code analysis phase. The latter phase is an enhancement of a previous approach developed by the authors aiming at improving the results of precision and time performances. The retrieval effectiveness of the approach is assessed by applying the recovery technique on four software systems