Macro and micro patterns in the software design activity

Abstract

The activities of software analysis and design are important because they are the first steps in the software development. The objective of this paper is to identify the patterns that emerge during these activities. Identifying these patterns is important because we can imitate the patterns that increase our productivity and avoid the patterns that decrease our productivity. The patterns are made from sequences the logical actions “Create”, “Delete” and “Rename” applied on the elements of the design diagrams. These actions are collected when creating UML class diagrams with the open source modeling tool ArgoUML. The patterns found are of two types: micro-pattens and macro-patterns. These patterns were related to different design strategies such as top down, breadth first.