Framework Comprehension and Design Patterns: A Reverse Engineering Approach

Object-oriented frameworks are generic designs for specific application domains, that enable the reuse of designs and domain expert experience. In spite of this, framework are not simple to reuse because they are difficult to comprehend, mainly due to a lack of good documentation and supporting tools. In this work, an approach to framework comprehension based on visualization of design patterns is presented. A tool was built to support this approach, by trying to automatically identify and explain the potential patterns existing in a given design. Experimental results and conclusions of tool utilization are also presented.