Evaluation Of Design Pattern Recovery Tools

Design pattern recovery approaches are assisted by different tools which recognize patterns from source code of legacy applications. Several tools are presented in related work, but little attention is paid on the evaluation of tools due to the unavailability of standard benchmarks and frameworks. Different pattern recovery tools extract different results from the same examined systems. The causes for disparity of results and ignorance for cross validation of results by different tools is still not thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we review existing design pattern recovery tools based on their available features and compare them regarding limitations of different tools. We recommend guidelines based on our observation and on the evaluation of different tools which can be used for comparing features of existing tools and developing new design pattern recovery tools. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the Guest Editor.