Reverse-Engineering the Literature on Design Patterns and Reverse-Engineering

Since their inception in 1994, design patterns have been the subject of many papers. In the reverse-engineering community, several authors have proposed approaches to consider design patterns during reverseand re-engineering. However, it has been recently put forward in the community that it is difficult to compare previous approaches due to the diversity of vocabulary and the lack of a general framework to map and relate these approaches. Consequently, we study 59 papers related to design patterns in the software engineering community at large (1) to identify and define common terms related to design patterns, (2) to identify recurring themes in the papers, and (3) to further characterise approaches for design pattern detection along several categories. Recurring themes allow us to provide the portrait of the “typical” paper on design patterns while catagories draw the portrait of the “typical” approach in design pattern detection. We propose to the community to use a fix vocabulary, to diversify the approaches, and to build a common benchmark to assess the reverse engineering of design patterns.