Visualizing Composition in Design Patterns

Abstract

Visualization of design patterns information play a vital role in analysis, design and comprehension of software applications. Different representations of design patterns have been proposed in literature, but each representation has its strengths and limitations. State of the art design pattern visualization approaches are unable to capture all the aspects of design pattern visualization which is important for the comprehension of any software application e.g., the role that a class, attribute and operation play in a design pattern. Additionally, there exist multiple instances of a design pattern and different types of overlapping in the design of different systems. Visualization of overlapping and composition in design patterns is important for forward and reverse engineering domains. The focus of this paper is to analyze the characteristics, strengths and limitations of key design pattern representations used for visualization and propose a hybrid approach which incorporates best features of existing approaches while suppressing their limitations. The approach extends features which are important for visualizing different types of overlapping in design patterns. Stereotypes, tagged values, semantics and constraints are defined to represent the design pattern information related to attributes and/or operations of a class. A prototyping tool named VisCDP is developed to demonstrate and evaluate our proposed.