A method to recover design patterns using software product metrics

Software design patterns are a way of facilitating design reuse in object-oriented systems by capturing recurring design practices. Lots of design patterns have been identified and, further, various usages of patterns are known, e.g., documenting frameworks and reengineering legacy systems [8, 15]. To benefit fully from using the new concept, we need to develop more systematic methods of capturing design patterns. In this paper, we propose a new method to recover the GoF(1) patterns using software measurement skills. We developed a design pattern CASE tool to facilitate the easy application of our method. To demonstrate the usefulness of our approach, we carried out a case study, and its experimental results are reported.