Recommendation system for design patterns in software development: An DPR overview

Abstract

Software maintenance can become monotonous and expensive due to ignorance and misapplication of appropriate design patterns during the early phases of design and development. To have a good and reusable system, designers and developers must be aware of large information set and many quality concerns, e.g., design patterns. Systems with correct design pattern may ensure easy maintenance and evolution. However, without assistance, designing and development of software systems following certain design patterns is difficult for engineers. Recommendation systems for software engineering can assist designers and developers with a wide range of activities including suggesting design patterns. With the help of pattern recommenders, designers can come up with a reusable design. We provide a Design Pattern Recommender (DPR) process overview for software design to suggest design patterns, based on a simple Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach. Our prototype provides two-fold solution. In the primary-level, DPR only proposes one or more design patterns for a problem context, and in the secondary level, for a initial set of design, DPR refactors models and suggests design patterns. Our preliminary evaluation shows that DPR has a good trade-off between accuracy and procedural complexity, comparing to other state-of-the-art approaches.