Abstract

Design patterns are important in software maintenance because they help in designing, in understanding, and in re-engineering programs. The identification of occurrences of a design pattern consists in identifying, in a program, classes which structure and organisation match—strictly or approximately—the structure and organisation of classes as suggested by the design pattern. We express the problem of design pattern identification with operations on finite sets of bit-vectors. We use the inherent parallelism of bit-wise operations to derive an efficient bit-vector algorithm that finds exact and approximate occurrences of design patterns in a program. We apply our algorithm on three smallto-medium size programs, JHotDraw, Juzzle, and QuickUML, with the Abstract Factory and Composite design patterns and compare its performance and results with two existing constraint-based approaches. 1

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