A Design Pattern Detection Plugin for Eclipse

It is well known that software maintenance and evolution are expensive activities, both in terms of invested time and money. Reverse engineering activities support the obtainment of abstractions and views from a target system that should help the engineers to maintain, evolve and eventually re-engineer it. An important task pursued by reverse engineering is design pattern detection, whose main objective is the identification of the design patterns that have been used in the implementation of a system, that let the practitioners focus on the overall architecture of the system without minding at the programming details it has been implemented with. In this context we propose an Eclipse plug-in called MARPLE (Metrics and Architecture Reconstruction Plug-in for Eclipse), which supports the detection of design patterns through the use of basic elements that are mechanically extracted from source code. The development of this platform is mainly based on the exploitation of the Eclipse framework, relying also on two plugins: Java development tools (JDT) for code analysis and the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) for results visualization.