Reverse engineering of framework design using a meta-patterns-based approach

Object-oriented frameworks are a powerful reuse technique but they are also very complex and difficult to design. Framework’s design aims at separating the invariant aspects across several applications in a domain – frozen spots – from the aspects that vary among applications and thus must be kept flexible and customizable – hot spots. The flexibility and extensibility provided at hot spots is usually achieved by following common design patterns, which are often hard and tiresome to identify without proper documentation. This paper proposes a reverse engineering approach to identify the design patterns used in a framework, using a high-level hot spot representation. The goals of this work include: researching a design approach that produces usable intermediate reuse information; defining a representation for design patterns based on metapatterns; and developing a supporting tool to automate the reverse engineering process.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: AICCSA
• Authors: Nuno Flores, Ademar Aguiar
• Keywords: AICCSA 2005, Design Patterns, Hardware, Hot Spot, Reverse Engineering