Design Patterns: a Survey on Their Micro-Structures

Design patterns play a significant role in reverse engineering by providing information not only on how but also on why a solution has been implemented in a specific way due to their semantics. The application of design patterns leads to their personalization to a specific context, hence to the generation of variants. This makes their recognition a challenging task, which may be addressed through the understanding and detection of the microstructures design patterns are made of. This is very useful for the detection as well as for the application of design patterns. The principal aim of this paper is to present a survey on these micro-structures and a comparison among them in the perspective of reverse engineering. Due to their less complex structure and behavior, as well as closer link to the source code, the recognition of these micro-structures may be automated, which can be considered a step towards the automatic recognition of the more complex design patterns. In this paper we consider four of the most significant types of micro-structures: elemental design patterns, clues, subpatterns, and micro patterns. To analyze the role of the micro-structures in the design pattern detection process we make a comparison among these four types of micro-structures and among the micro-structures of different types in order to identify the relations among them.