Design Patterns Consideration in Class Interactions Prediction Development

Customer changing their needs is a typical phenomenon in the software development phase. Predicting impact of a change is needed prior to actual change implementation so that an effective planning can be made. Several high level artifact analysis approaches have been developed including performing the prediction using class interactions. Since design patterns are one of the elements that affect the structure of actual class interactions, this paper proposes a new class interactions prediction approach that considers a design pattern analysis in its process. To demonstrate the design pattern analysis implementation, this paper selects the Boundary-Controller-Entity (BCE) pattern as an instance. A comparison between the new approach (with design pattern analysis) and two selected current approaches (without design pattern analysis) were conducted. The contributions of the paper are: (1) a new class interactions prediction approach; and (2) an evaluation that shows the new approach gives more accurate class interactions prediction than the selected current approaches.