Analyzing source code for automated design pattern recommendation

Mastery of the subtleties of object-oriented programming lan- guages is undoubtedly challenging to achieve. Design patterns have been proposed some decades ago in order to support soft- ware designers and developers in overcoming recurring challeng- es in the design of object-oriented software systems. However, given that dozens if not hundreds of patterns have emerged so far, it can be assumed that their mastery has become a serious chal- lenge in its own right. In this paper, we describe a proof of con- cept implementation of a recommendation system that aims to detect opportunities for the Strategy design pattern that developers have missed so far. For this purpose, we have formalized natural language pattern guidelines from the literature and quantified them for static code analysis with data mined from a significant collection of open source systems. Moreover, we present the re- sults from analyzing 25 different open source systems with this prototype as it discovered more than 200 candidates for imple- menting the Strategy pattern and the encouraging results of a pre- liminary evaluation with experienced developers. Finally, we sketch how we are currently extending this work to other patterns.