Design Patterns from Theory to Practice

Abstract

Design patterns (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, & Vlissides, 1995) extract good solutions to standard problems in a particular context. Modern software industry has widely adopted design patterns to reuse best practices and improve the quality of software systems. Each design pattern describes a generic piece of design that can be instantiated in different applications. Multiple design patterns can be integrated to solve different design problems. To precisely and unambiguously describe a design pattern, formal specification methods are used. Each design pattern presents extensible design that can evolve after the pattern is applied. While design patterns have been applied in many large systems, pattern-related information is generally not available in source code or even the design model of a software system. Recovering pattern-related information and visualizing it in design diagrams can help to understand the original design decisions and tradeoffs. In this article, we concentrate on the issues related to design pattern instantiation, integration, formalization, evolution, visualization, and discovery. We also discuss the research work addressing these issues.