Design improvement through dynamic and Structural pattern identification

Despite the high design quality they can produce, design patterns remain difficult to reuse directly within a development process. To overcome this problem, several works proposed approaches and/or tools to identify design patterns for code improvement and/or re-engineering purposes. Overall, theses propositions either rely mainly on the static aspect of the pattern, or require an exact match between the design pattern and its instantiation in the design/code. In this paper, we propose to improve designs through recognizing occurrences of patterns using both static and dynamic information. To propose improvements in a design, we adapt an XML document retrieval technique and, thus, tolerate design variability with respect to non essential parts of the pattern.