Design patterns selection: An automatic two-phase method

Over many years of research and practices in software development, hundreds of software design patterns have been invented and published. Now, a question which naturally arises is how software developers select the right design patterns from all relevant patterns to solve design problems in the software design phase. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a two-phase method to select a right design pattern. The proposed method is based on a text classification approach that aims to show an appropriate way to suggest the right design pattern(s) to developers for solving each given design problem. There are two advantages of the proposed method in comparison to previous works. First, there is no need for semi-formal specifications of design patterns and second, the suitable design patterns are suggested with their degree of similarity to the design problem. To evaluate the proposed method, we apply it on real problems and several case studies. The experimental results show that the proposed method is promising and effective. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.