The EPI Approach
Document Actions
Design patterns are important in software maintenance because they help in understanding and re-engineering systems. The identification of occurrences of design patterns in large systems consists of identifying classes whose structure and organization match exactly or approximately the structure and organization of classes as suggested by the design pattern. We adapt two classical approximate string matching algorithms based on automata simulation and bit-vector processing to efficiently identify exact and approximate occurrences of design patterns. We then carry out two case studies to show the performance, precision, and recall of our algorithms. In the first case study, we assess the performance of our algorithms on seven medium-to-large systems. In the second case study, we compare our approach with three existing approaches (an explanation-based constraint approach, a metric-enhanced explanation-based constraint approach, and a similarity scoring approach) by applying the algorithms on three small-to-medium size systems, JHotDraw, Juzzle, and QuickUML. Our studies show that approximate string matching based on bit-vector processing provides efficient algorithms to identify design patterns.
Please, read the latest paper related to EPI for more information. Some data are also available for replications.
