The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424

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The Journal of Systems and Software

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jss

Design patterns selection: An automatic two-phase method

Seyed Mohammad Hossein Hasheminejad, Saeed Jalili
SCS Lab., Department of Computer Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Over many years of research and practices in software development, hundreds of software design patterns
Received 4 September 2010 have been invented and published. Now, a question which naturally arises is how software developers
Received in revised form 30 August 2011 select the right design patterns from all relevant patterns to solve design problems in the software design
Accepted 31 August 2011
phase. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a two-phase method to select a right design pattern.
Available online 8 September 2011
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
Keywords:
two advantages of the proposed method in comparison to previous works. First, there is no need for
Software design pattern
Text classification
semi-formal specifications of design patterns and second, the suitable design patterns are suggested
Machine learning with their degree of similarity to the design problem. To evaluate the proposed method, we apply it
Automatic pattern selection on real problems and several case studies. The experimental results show that the proposed method is
promising and effective.
© 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
In software development lifecycle, design is one of the most
difficult tasks. In the literature, a number of design methods have
been advanced that among ones, architecture-based design meth-
ods which commonly use software architecture styles are believed
to be more important than the others (Bass et al., 2003). Each
software architecture style includes some components and their
relations that meet the style’s constraints.
A common practice in the architecture-based design methods is
ADD (Attribute-Driven Design) (Bass et al., 2003). In ADD, software
developers initially choose a software architecture style consider-
ing quality attributes that the software system should have, then
they assign system’s requirements to its architectural components.
At this step, the software developers can employ software design
patterns for designing requirements related to each architectural
component.
A design pattern encapsulates a proven solution to a recurring
design problem. Over many years, software developers suggest
solutions for satisfying design problems of architectural compo-
nents. These experience-based solutions are standardized and have
been organized in the form of design patterns. The use of design
patterns in software development can provide several advantages,
such as: increasing reusability, modularization, quality, consistency
between the design and the implementation, and relationship
E-mail addresses: SMH.Hasheminejad@Modares.ac.ir (S.M.H. Hasheminejad),
Sjalili@Modares.ac.ir (S. Jalili).
between the design and the implementation teams (Gamma et al.,
1994; Graves and Czarnecki, 2000).
However, it is so difficult task to find right design patterns for
solving a given design problem without any tool support, because
determining the applicability of a design pattern to a given prob-
lem heavily relies on the experience of the software developers
(Kim and Khawand, 2007) and it is also extremely difficult for
novice developers who are not familiar with design patterns and
do not know how to find the best one. In addition, there are a
large number of design patterns (Booch, 2006) that become more
challenging for the developer who is highly knowledgeable about
patterns.
To help overcome these difficulties, in this paper, we attempt to
automatically suggest a right design pattern(s) to the developer in
design phase according to the given design problem.
By far, little work has been made for the automatic selection of
design pattern in the software design phase (Kim and Khawand,
2007). On the contrary, many attempts have been made toward
the determination of design patterns after the end of program-
ming phase, which is considered as a reverse engineering method
to increase maintainability (Kim and Khawand, 2007).
Current attempts to select the right design patterns can be
divided into two approaches. First, a UML-Based approach (Kim and
Khawand, 2007; Hsueh et al., 2007; Kim and Shen, 2008) which
uses existing UML diagrams in analysis phase (i.e., class diagrams
and collaboration diagrams) to define design patterns and determi-
nate the right design pattern(s) for each design problem. Second,
an Ontology-Based approach (Hasso and Carlson, 2005; Blomqvist,
2008; Hasso and Carlson, 2004; Khoury et al., 2008) which uses
ontologies for the definition and selection of the right design

0164-1212/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jss.2011.08.031
 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
pattern(s). The UML-Based approach has a number of weaknesses.
Firstly, it has a limit to precisely specify the problem definition of
all design patterns. Secondly, it costs high for meta-model pro-
duction for each design pattern and is inefficient to deal with a
large number of design patterns. Finally, it does not suggest differ-
ent design patterns according to the extent of similarity between
the problem definition of the retrieved design pattern and the
design problem. The Ontology-Based approach also has several
shortcomings, for example, it is expensive and creates barriers in
the approach automation. In addition, due to the lack of a unique
ontology for software engineering domain, it seems highly imprac-
tical (Blomqvist, 2008).
The proposed method is based on a Text Classification approach,
aims at learning knowledge and experiences of experts who
invented design patterns and who can select the right design
pattern(s) for each given design problem. The text classification
approach takes as an input design patterns, each having a spe-
cific label called Design Patterns Class that has been manually
determined by experts, for example, in book written by Gamma
et al. (1994), design patterns are divided into three design pat-
terns classes, i.e., Creational, Structural, and Behavioral Patterns. The
goal is therefore to learn knowledge of experts, i.e., design pattern
labels, to determine the most suitable design pattern label for each
given design problem. In other words, the input of our proposed
method is the problem definitions of some design patterns and their
labels. Although the existing approaches described above employ a
semi-formal language like UML or the formal meaning of words in
ontologies, the simple, high precision and low-cost text classifica-
tion approach just uses the narrative text of the problem definition
part of design patterns to determinate a right design pattern for a
given design problem.
The proposed method has two distinct steps. In the first step,
i.e., Learning Design Patterns, after performing preprocessing on the
problem definition part of design patterns, for each design pat-
terns class, one classifier is learned. In the second step, i.e., Design
Pattern Retrieval, among design patterns classes which learned in
previous step, first, a candidate design pattern class similar to a
given design problem is determined based on the text classifica-
tion approach, then the right design pattern(s) which belongs to
the candidate design pattern class is suggested to the developer.
There are multiple choices for the steps of the proposed method;
therefore, an evaluation model has been presented for the determi-
nation of the best choice. The results of an experimental evaluation
using real design problems to suggest the right design pattern(s)
from three design pattern groups reveal a promising Precision
value of 0.62, a Recall value of 0.75, and a low False Positive value
of 0.037.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, we
describe the definition of design patterns. Section 3 presents an
overview of the text classification concepts, and in Section 4, the
proposed method is described. In Section 5, the evaluation model
of the proposed method is presented. In Section 6, the proposed
method is evaluated using real design problems. Section 7 describes
a model to evaluate the consistency of the proposed design patterns
classes manually determined by researchers. Section 8 states some
limitations of the proposed method and related work is discussed
in Section 9 before the paper concludes in Section 10.
2. Analysis of design patterns
In general, a design pattern is described in a template consisting
of two sections, Problem Domain and Solution Domain. The Prob-
lem Domain describes the problem context where the pattern can
be applied. Analogously the Solution Domain describes the struc-
ture and collaborations of the pattern solution being applied to the
409
Table 1
The adapter design pattern description (Gamma et al., 1994).
Pattern name Adapter (Wrapper) Pattern
Problem Domain - Problem Definition
Intent Convert the interface of a class into another interface
clients expect. Adapter lets classes work together that
could not otherwise because of incompatible
interfaces.
Motivation Sometimes a toolkit class that is designed for reuse is
not reusable only because its interface does not match
the domain-specific interface an application requires.
Consider for example a drawing editor that lets users
draw and arrange graphical elements (lines, polygons,
text, etc.) into pictures and diagrams. The drawing
editor’s key abstraction is the graphical object, which
has an editable shape and can draw itself. The interface
for graphical objects is defined by an abstract class
called Shape.
The rest of Motivation section is available in Gamma
et al. (1994).
Applicability You want to use an existing class, and its interface does
not match the one you need.
You want to create a reusable class that cooperates
with unrelated or unforeseen classes, that is, classes
that do not necessarily have compatible interfaces.
Solution Domain - Design Pattern
Structure
Solution Domain - Design Specification
Participants Target, Adaptee, Client, and Adapter
Collaborations Clients call operations on an Adapter instance. In turn,
the adapter calls Adaptee operations that carry out the
request.
Consequences Adapts Adaptee to Target by committing to a concrete
Adapter class. As a consequence, a class adapter will
not work when we want to adapt a class and all its
subclasses.
Lets Adapter override some of Adaptee’s behavior,
since Adapter is a subclass of Adaptee.
Introduces only one object and no additional pointer
indirection is needed to get to the Adaptee.
Implementation The implementation of Adapter in C++ is available in
Gamma et al. (1994).
Related Patterns Bridge, Decorator, and Proxy Pattern
For example: Bridge has a structure similar to an
adapter, but Bridge has a different intent: It is meant to
separate an interface from its implementation so that
they can be varied easily and independently.
problem. Any design pattern consists of Pattern Name section (orig-
inated from its concept), Intent section (description of its problem),
Motivation section (a scenario that illustrates a design problem),
Applicability section (the situations in which the design pattern can
be applied), Structure section (a structure of the participants in the
Solution Domain), Participants section (the classes and/or objects
participating in the Solution Domain), Collaborations section (col-
laboration diagrams between solution participants), Consequences
section (the results and trade-offs of applying the pattern), Imple-
mentation section, and the Related Patterns section (Gamma et al.,
1994). In this paper, only Problem Domain of each design pat-
tern document including Intent, Motivation, and Applicability (called
Problem Definition) sections is used to select automatically the right
design pattern(s). To illustrate the template of a design pattern,
Table 1 shows the Adapter design pattern document from Gamma
et al. book (Gamma et al., 1994). Each section in the table describes a
specific aspect of the Adapter design pattern document. For exam-
ple, the Intent section describes a short statement that states the
410 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424

need for the Adapter design pattern. In this table, the Adapter method uses only the problem definitions of design patterns to
design pattern document is divided into three parts, Problem Defi- decide which design pattern(s) is suitable for the given design prob-
nition, Design Pattern, and Design Specification. lem.
There are a number of potential reasons why several researchers
(Gamma et al., 1994; Booch, 2006; Tichy, 1997; Pree, 1995; Coad
3. Overview of text classification
et al., 1995; Rising, 2000; Douglass, 2002; Trowbridge et al., 2006)
classify design patterns. The most significant factor is to create an
In general, supervised automatic text classification is a machine
abstraction for the Problem Domain of design patterns to search
learning technique, i.e., assigning documents automatically to one
ones according to their categories (i.e., design pattern class). In
or several predefined classes. When each document is assigned only
addition, these classifications can help the developers to manually
to one category it is called a single-label categorization.
search design patterns.
Classifications are usually made in binary mode, which means
In this paper, we employ the text classification approach that
the label of each document is either +1 or −1, i.e., each docu-
takes as an input the knowledge of the researchers, which is a
ment is assigned to either one category or its complementary
classification for design patterns, means that some design patterns
(Sebastiani, 2002; Jalili and Bitarafan, 2006; Jalili and Sadri, 2007).
are grouped into several classes (design pattern class) according
The text classification usually uses two sets: a training set and a
to their similarities. For this reason, the classifications made by
test set. The training set is used for learning some classifiers and
researchers are discussed below.
requires a primary group of labeled documents, in which the cat-
We divide the design pattern classifications that had been done
egory related to each document is obvious from its label. The test
manually so far into two groups, Problem Based and Solution Based
set is used to measure the efficiency of the learned classifiers and
classification schemes:
includes labeled documents which do not participate in learning
classifiers.
Problem based classification scheme. Gamma et al. (1994)
divided design patterns into three high level categories, Creational,
3.1. Common text representation and processing
Structural, and Behavioral. Pree (1995) also added a new coarse-
grained classification scheme to the design patterns listed in
Texts cannot be directly interpreted by a classifier or by a
Gamma et al. (1994) which relied on Abstract Coupling and Recur-
classifier-building algorithm. Therefore, at first, a preprocessing is
sive Structures. Coad et al. (1995) organized design patterns into
performed on text documents and then a classifier is learned. Dur-
four major subclasses, Transaction, Aggregate, Plan, and Interaction.
ing the preprocessing phase, usually two actions are performed
Tichy (1997) attempted to categorize the design patterns based on
on the documents, filtering stop words (e.g., articles, conjunc-
problems in design phase. The major categories cited were Decou-
tions, prepositions, and etc.) and stemming words. Stemming
pling, Variant Management, State Handling, Control, Virtual Machine,
methods (Hotho et al., 2005) are used to reduce the num-
Convenience Patterns, Compound Patterns, Concurrency, and Distri-
ber of words in the document and try to build basic forms of
bution. Rising (2000) used application domains as categories, for
words, i.e., strip the plural‘s’ from nouns, the ‘ing’ from verbs,
example, Accounting, Air Defense, Hypermedia, Integration, Trading,
and etc. A well-known rule-based stemming algorithm has been
Database, C++ idioms, Persistence, System Modeling, and Customer
originally proposed by Porter (2006). He defined a set of pro-
Interactions. Douglass (2002) categorized design patterns into six
duction rules to transform iteratively (English) words into their
classes, the Architecture Design, Concurrency, Memory, Resources,
stems. Some stemming instruments have also been produced, such
Distribution, and Safety and Reliability. In the classification made by
as UEA (2011).
Booch (2006), a large number of design patterns had been men-
In the next step, called indexing, the document presentation
tioned, most of them are related to architecture design. In his
model is determined. The most common model for indexing is
classification, design patterns had been categorized into 45 cate-
vector space model, which presents documents as feature vec-
gories. Trowbridge et al. (2006) classified design patterns based
tors without using any explicit semantic information. In this
on the following questions: Purpose (Why), Data (What), Func-
model, each feature indicates the presence or absence of a word,
tion (How), Timing (When), Network (Where), People (Who), and
or frequency of a term in a document. To improve the per-
Scoreboard (Test)
formance of the text classification and remove noises of the
Solution based classification scheme. Zimmer (1995) catego-
documents, usually term weighting schemes are used (Sebastiani,
rized design patterns based on the links between their solutions,
2002; Hotho et al., 2005), where the weights reflect the impor-
such as, the solution of one pattern is composed of the solution of
tance of a word in a specific document of the considered collection.
another pattern, the solution of one pattern is similar to the solu-
There are several ways of determining the weight of any word
tion of another pattern, and etc. However, these relations have
in documents (Hotho et al., 2005): Binary, Term Frequency (TF),
been stated only between a few numbers of design patterns.
Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF), Term Fre-
quency Collection (TFC), Length Term Collection (LTC), and Entropy
Kim and Han (2007) grouped the design pattern solu- weighting.
tions according to their structures and dependencies in object- In the last step, feature selection methods are used for noise
oriented. omission and reducing the number of words and feature vector
Although current classifications lead to ease in selection of the dimensions. The feature selection methods attempt to keep the
right design pattern(s) manually by the developers, they still face classifier precision unchanged by removal of a subset of features.
two obstacles: the high number of categories and a large number of The feature selection methods are divided into two general cate-
design patterns in each category. These obstacles lead to difficulty gories: wrapper methods and filtering methods. Filtering methods
in selection of design patterns for developers; therefore, to over- are simple, low-cost, useful, more efficient, and computationally
come these obstacles, we need a tool to automatically select right easier than wrapper methods (Hotho et al., 2005). There are differ-
design patterns. ent types of filtering methods (Jalili and Bitarafan, 2006; Hotho et
In the proposed method, between the two presented classifi- al., 2005): Document Frequency (DF), Information Gain (IG), Mutual
cations, namely Problem Based and Solution Based, we select only Information (MI), Chi-square (CHI), and Correlation Coefficient (CC)
the Problem Based classification as an input, because the proposed method.
 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
Fig. 1. Process of the proposed design pattern(s) selection for each given design problem.
Fig. 2. Activities of design patterns preprocessing step.
4. Proposed method
Text classification approach has been used in different domains;
therefore, we mention some of that: first, to choose the most suit-
able category for a given advertisement, a newspaper agency, like
Reuters, classifies a high volume of advertisements in an automatic
manner (Sebastiani, 2002). Second, to organize patents into cate-
gories, the text classification approach is used for making search
easier (Larkey, 1999). Third, to automatically classify Web pages,
or websites, under the hierarchical catalogues, text classification
approach is used to find a particularly interest category (Attardi
et al., 1998). Finally, to filter spam, electronic mailboxes often
use this approach (Androutsopoulos et al., 2000; Jalili and Gerani,
2007).
Our main motivation for using the text classification approach is
its abilities in the automatic classification, therefore, we use it in the
proposed method to organize design patterns and to automatically
retrieve the right design pattern for a given design problem. In addi-
tion, the motivation is the fact that the design patterns selection
problem is similar to an IR (Information Retrieval) problem; there-
fore, with regard to the literature, we can use the text classification
approach for solving the design patterns selection problem.
In the proposed method, the text classification steps are per-
formed on the narrative text of Problem Definition part of design
patterns (see Table 1).
Fig. 1 shows the process of the proposed method to select the
right design pattern(s) which works in four steps: (1) Preprocessing,
(2) Learning Design Patterns Classifiers as Design Patterns Organiza-
tion, (3) Determination of A Design Patterns Class, and (4) Suggestion
of Design Pattern(s) as Two-Phase Retrieval of the Right Design Pat-
tern(s). The following sections describe the steps of the process.
4.1. Preprocessing
As shown in Fig. 1, preprocessing the text of all design pat-
tern problem definitions is the first step of the proposed method.
The activities of the preprocessing are illustrated by a chart
in Fig. 2. In this chart, there are some optional activities, con-
sist of word stemming, term weighting, and feature selection,
shown by the dark blocks. The reason for their use in the text
411
classification approach is to improve the efficiency of the proposed
method.
As discussed earlier, at first, stop words are removed; second, the
extracted words are stemmed. Third, for each design patterns class,
one particular training set is created based on single-label catego-
rization and binary mode (see Section 3). To create the training set
for each design patterns class, the labels of design patterns belong-
ing to this class are positive (i.e., +1), and the labels of the rest of
design patterns are negative (i.e., −1).
Fourth, the vector space model is used for indexing and for all
classifiers a feature vector is formed, describing all non-repeated
terms in the documents.
Finally, among weighting methods and feature selection meth-
ods mentioned earlier in Section 3.1, one of them can be selected
and applied to the feature vector.
4.2. Learning classifiers of design patterns
In the second step, as shown in Fig. 1, a classifier is learned for
each design patterns class using the training set corresponding to
that design patterns class.
Note that there are several techniques for supervised learning
(classification), but it cannot be said which one is better than others
(Alpaydın, 2010). The reason is that there is no learning technique
that achieves good results for all problems. In real life, some of them
may achieve good results for some problems and bad results for
the rest (Alpaydın, 2010). Therefore, for a new problem (i.e., design
pattern selection) to find out the best learning technique, we evalu-
ate several learning techniques so that the best learning technique
is identified. Thus, one of the contributions of this paper is to sug-
gest the best learning technique compatible with the design pattern
selection. Because common learning techniques in the text classi-
fications are (Sebastiani, 2002; Hotho et al., 2005) Naïve Bayesian,
K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), C4.5 Decision Trees, and Support Vector
Machines (SVM) techniques, learning each classifier is performed
in four different ways.
In recent years, a fairly large number of machine learning tools
have been advanced in practice to automatically use their tech-
niques. Among the well-known machine learning tools, we use
SVM Light (SVM, 2011) and WEKA (JPML, 2006) which include dif-
ferent types of classification methods. Using the evaluation model,
described in Section 5, the efficiency of the different learning tech-
niques is evaluated.
Finally, we choose the best learning technique compatible with
the design pattern selection based on the presented evaluation
model.
After finding the learning technique with the best performance,
each classifier is typically trained again using the entire initial
design patterns of each design patterns class and these classifiers
412 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
are then used in subsequent steps. In this case, the result of the eval-
uation is a pessimistic estimation of effectiveness, because the final
classifier is trained with more data in comparison to the evaluated
classifier (Sebastiani, 2002).
4.3. Determination of a design patterns class
As displayed in Fig. 1, the design pattern(s) corresponding to
each given design problem is suggested to the developer in two
phases (i.e., phases 3 and 4). For more clarity, Fig. 3 shows the
proposed two-phase retrieval of the design pattern(s) for a sam-
ple design problem, where each person is a symbol of the classifier,
while + and − symbols in the rectangle present the decisions of the
corresponding classifier.
In Fig. 3, we choose a sample collection of design patterns (i.e.,
Douglass Patterns (Douglass, 2002)), divided by expert opinions
into five classes including, Concurrency, Memory, Resources, Dis-
tribution, and Safety and Reliability patterns. Therefore, during the
previous steps of the proposed method, five classifiers correspond-
ing design patterns classes are learned. Note that the input of this
section is the learned classifiers and the given design problems, in
contrast, the output of it is a candidate design patterns class for
each given design problem.
As shown in Fig. 3, a design problem description is given to each
classifier, like an expert, to identify whether the design problem is
related to the problem definitions of design patterns belonging to
the classifier or not. As illustrated in Fig. 3, among the five learned
classifiers, only one classifier opinion is positive, i.e., only Distribu-
tion Patterns classifier decides that design problem n belongs to its
design patterns class.
After that, one or more design patterns corresponding to the
given design problem are suggested to the developer (see Section
4.4).
At this phase, after obtaining the description of the design prob-
lem, stemming and weighting are performed on their words as the
preprocessing process. The vector space of the sample design prob-
lem, i.e., design problem n vector space, is created according to the
classifiers vector space and the result of which is depicted in Fig. 4.
Each element of the vector shown in Fig. 4 presents a word of the
problem definitions of the design patterns, where M is the number
of words of all problem definitions of design patterns. Fig. 4 shows
that design problem n has 10 words already in the classifiers vector
space, so for these words, the corresponding feature values are 1
and for the rest, the feature values are 0.
4.4. Suggestion of design pattern(s)
As shown in Fig. 3, in the design pattern(s) suggestion phase,
after a candidate design patterns class which is appropriate to
the given design problem, is identified by the classifiers, the most
suitable design pattern to the given design problem is identified
from that design patterns class using cosine similarity and applying
threshold.
To suggest a right design pattern (from the identified design pat-
terns class) for the given design problem, first, the cosine similarity
(Si ) between the problem definition of ith design pattern and the
design problem description is calculated based on Eq. (1).

M
Si = w(DesignPatterni , tk ) × w(TheDesignProblem, tk )
k=1
where DesignPatterni and TheDesignProblem are the problem def-
inition of ith design pattern and the design problem description,
respectively. In Eq. (1), it is assumed that a document d, for example,
a design pattern problem definition or a design problem descrip-
tion, is defined by a vector of term weights W(d) = (w(d, t1 ),. . .,w(d,
tm )), where each w(d, ti ) presents a weight for each word of the
design patterns collection, i.e., the size of the vector M is defined
by the number of words of the complete design patterns collec-
tion after stop words removal and word stemming. After similarity
measurement (based on Eq. (1)), one of the following equations is
applied to select the best design pattern.
A. With respect to Eq. (2), jth design pattern with the highest value
of Si is suggested to the developer.
j = argmax Si (2)
i
B. The design patterns with Si that satisfy Eq. (3) are suggested to
the developer.
|Si | > 1 (3)
where  1 is the threshold level for similarity. Depending on the
value of  1 , no pattern might be suggested to the developer.
C. The design patterns with Si that satisfy Eq. (4) are suggested to
the developer.
|SMax − Si | ≤ 2 , (4)
where  2 and SMax are the threshold level for similarity and the
highest value of similarities between all design patterns and the
given design problem.
D. The proposed method can use a combination of Eqs. (2)–(4):
first, use Eq. (3) to filter design patterns, and second, use Eq. (2)
to find the best design pattern, and last, use Eq. (4) to suggest all
design patterns close to the best design pattern.
The efficient threshold level is obtained from experiment
(Sebastiani, 2002). Appropriate values for  1 and  2 will be pro-
posed in Section 6 according to the performed evaluations.
5. Proposed evaluation model
In this section, first a model for evaluating different learning
techniques of design patterns classes is described. In the evalua-
tion, the best learning technique for determining the right design
patterns class will be selected. Next, a method is presented for eval-
uating the proposed options in Section 4.4 for suggesting the design
pattern(s) from design patterns belonging to the selected design
patterns class. To evaluate the proposed method, we use resources
consisting of three design pattern groups and 60 real design prob-
lems, which are described in Sections 5.3 and 5.4, respectively.
5.1. Learning evaluation of design patterns classes
The evaluation of document classifiers is typically conducted
experimentally, rather than analytically. The classification effec-
tiveness is usually measured in terms of four parameters, Precision
(P), Recall (R), F1 (as combination of P and R using Eq. (5)), and False
Positive error rate (FP). To estimate P and R for learned classifiers,
either micro-averaging equations or macro-averaging equations
can be used.
We use micro-averaging equations (see Eqs. (6) and (7)), because
they are more precise than macro-averaging equations (Sebastiani,
2002). To select the best weighting method for each learning tech-
nique, we use the Effect of Weighting Method (EWM) computed
(1)
according to Eq. (8). Let EWMi be the effect of each weighting
method, for example, the Binary, TF, TFIDF, TFC, and Entropy weight-
ing method, on the learning technique. Therefore, EWMi for each
weighting method is computed, next the one which has the high-
est value of EWM is chosen. In the following equations, where C is
the number of design patterns classes, TP is the number of design
problems which belong to a design patterns class and the classifier
 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424 413

Fig. 3. The scheme of the two-phase retrieval of the right design pattern(s) for Design Problem n.

Fig. 4. The schema of Design Problem n vector space.

414 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
has correctly identified them, FP is the number of design problems
which do not belong to a design patterns class but the classifier
has incorrectly identified them as belonging to that design patterns
class, and FN is the number of design problems which belong to a
design patterns class but the classifier has not identified them as
belonging to that design patterns class.
2×P×R
F1 =
(P + R)
|C|
i=1
TPi
P= |C| , Micro-averaging
i=1
(TPi + FPi )
|C|
i=1
TPi
R= |C| , Micro-averaging
(TPi + FNi )
i=1
EWMi = F1,i − FPi
To select the best learning technique, we calculate two factors
called Evaluation Metrics Fusion (EMF) as follows:
(P + R)
EMF1 = − ˛ × FP
2 from design documents of several applications. For example, one
EMF2 = (1 − ˇ) × P + ˇ × R − ˛ × FP
As shown in EMF1 , P and R have been assigned the same weight, but
FP has been considered as a penalty with a tuning coefficient ˛ ≥ 0.
Based on EMF2 , a learning technique is suggested with regards to
the effectiveness (ˇ) of P and R. If Precision (P) is more important
than Recall (R) for the proposed design patterns identification sys-
tem, ˇ < 0.5 is considered, otherwise, ˇ > 0.5. In case ˇ = 0.5, EMF2
reduces to EMF1 .
Finally, for feature selection, the Document Frequency (DF)
method is used in the evaluation model.
5.2. Evaluation of design pattern(s) selection
The goal is to select the closest pattern(s) to the problem, after
identifying of a design patterns class related to a design problem.
This phase of the evaluation is only applied to real design prob-
lems. Having determined design patterns class of a real design
problem, the proper design pattern(s) is suggested applying the
method with the proper similarity equation presented in Section
4.4. Therefore, in this evaluation, among four similarity equations
described in Section 4.4, the one with the highest Ratio of Correct
Detection of Design Pattern (RCDDP), computed by Eq. (11), is chosen.
Number of Correctly Suggested Desgin Patterns
RCDDP =
Number of Suggested Desgin Patterns
5.3. Design patterns groups
In real life, design patterns are categorized in some groups by
software engineering experts. In our evaluation model, we use
three groups of design patterns which are frequently used.
Security patterns group. The integrating security systems using
security patterns are discussed in Schumacher et al. (2006), where
46 security patterns have been divided into eight categories. The
number of non-repeated words for all these 46 patterns after
removing stop words and stemming in this case study is 590
unique words.
Douglass patterns group. A robust scalable architecture has been
presented for real time systems in (Douglass, 2002) using design
patterns, where 34 design patterns have been presented in five
categories. The number of non-repeated words for all these 34
patterns after removing stop words and stemming in this case
study is 471 unique words.
GoF patterns group. The book (Gamma et al., 1994) of GoF (Gang
of Four) patterns which includes object-oriented design patterns
is one of the major references for design patterns, where 23 object-
oriented design patterns are divided into three coarse-grained
categories. The number of non-repeated words for all these 23 pat-
(5) terns after removing stop words and stemming in this case study
is 441 unique words.
(6) 5.4. Real design problems
We employ 60 real design problems extracted from differ-
ent resources (Schumacher et al., 2006; Silberschatz et al., 2002;
(7)
Tanenbaum, 2001; CS, 2011) to evaluate the effectiveness of the
proposed method. To provide an illustration of these design prob-
(8) lems, we introduce five of them as follows:
Real design problems for security patterns evaluation. To eval-
uate security patterns in terms of real design problems, we choose
22 security design problems from (Schumacher et al., 2006) and
(9)
of them is presented as follows:
(10)
Design Problem 1: “A user executes processes; processes are usually
created through system calls to the operating system. A process needs
to create a new process (a child process). How to define the rights to
be given to a new process?”
Real design problems for douglass patterns evaluation. Due to
the similarity between the Douglass design patterns and operat-
ing system design problems, we select 19 design problems from
two famous operating system books (Silberschatz et al., 2002;
Tanenbaum, 2001). For example, two design problems of them
are presented as follows:
Design Problem 2: “How to create a dependency between dis-
tributed clients so that when one object changes data, all its
dependent clients are notified and updated automatically”.
Design Problem 3: “All Program scripts must be loaded into physical
memory before they can be executed. So, we need the memory man-
ager of the operating system keeps track of allocated and unallocated
regions of physical memory”.
Real design problems for GoF patterns evaluation. To evaluate
this group of design patterns, we select 19 design problems from
two object-oriented detailed design documents including the E-
Archive Project (CS, 2011) and Personal Information Filter Project
(PIF) (CS, 2011). For example, two design problems of them are
presented as follows:
Design Problem 4: “The JDBC Control is used to provide and stan-
(11)
dardize the interface to the DBMS, thus increasing the modularity of
the connection with the database. How to create JDBC Control?”
Design Problem 5: “An operation should handle all incoming
requests from clients and forward the requests to the Event Handler.
The client uses a web browser to send httprequests to the servlet.
The servlet handles the request by sending a httpservletrequest to
the eventhandler, along with a httpservletresponse that can be used
to send results back to the corresponding browser”.
6. Results of the proposed method evaluation
In this section, the proposed method will be evaluated according
to the evaluation model presented in Section 5. To reduce features
and calculate the values of EMF1 and EMF2 in each learning tech-
nique, the most suitable weighting method (according to EWM) has
been used for the respective learning technique, unless the weight-
ing method is explicitly mentioned. In this paper, in KNN learning
technique, we assumed the value of parameter K, equal to 3 to
 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424 415

1
0.9 Naïve Bayes
SVM
0.8
0.7
0.6

EMF2
C4.5
0.5
0.4 KNN
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
Value of β using α = 1
Fig. 5. The evaluation results of learning security patterns.
Fig. 7. EMF2 curve of learning security patterns.

obtain better results. In all evaluations, a learning technique will

be suggested as the best learning technique, which has the highest
value of the EMF1 , where ˛ = 1, and for EMF2 ˛ = 1 and ˇ = 0.5, i.e.,
the point at which the value of criteria P and R are considered as
equal, like Breakeven Point (Sebastiani, 2002).
6.1. Learning evaluation using design pattern groups
In this section, the effectiveness of learning techniques in the
design patterns class identification is evaluated using the evalua-
tion model explained in Section 5.1 and the three pattern groups
mentioned in Section 5.3. In this evaluation, both the training set
and test set are obtained by a design patterns collection, where 70
percent of the design patterns collection, as the training set, are ran-
domly selected for training the classifier and the rest of the design
patterns collection (30 percent), as the test sets, are considered
for testing the classifier. In this section, each learning technique
is evaluated using 10 random training and test sets and their best
results have been reported. Although different weighting methods
Binary, TF, TFIDF, TFC and Entropy are applied in the evaluations,
only the best weighting method results in each learning technique
have been reported. Moreover, in all figures, LT and BWM stand for
Learning Technique and the Best Weighting Method, respectively.
6.1.1. Security patterns evaluation
Fig. 5 compares the evaluation results of the four learning tech-
niques, SVM, Naïve Bayes, C4.5, and KNN using security patterns.
As shown in Fig. 5, according to EWM criterion, Naïve Bayes and
SVM achieve better results than the other learning techniques.
Figs. 6 and 7 depict the results of combination of the evaluation
criteria according to curves of EMF1 and EMF2 , respectively.
All curves in Fig. 6 reveal that the values of EMF1 are decreased
by raising the penalty coefficient (˛). However, KNN has a steeper
decreasing slope in comparison to the other learning techniques.
Therefore, according to EMF1 criterion, Naïve Bayes achieves bet-
ter performance than the other learning techniques for security
patterns.
The upper curve in Fig. 7 reveals that the EMF2 values of Naïve
Bayes goes up to the value of 0.91 for ˇ equals to 0.2 and then
decreases slowly. Thereafter, the C4.5 curve falls steadily, reveal-
ing when the more attention is paid to R than P, the value of EMF2
decreases more. The KNN and SVM curves are constant for different
ˇ coefficients, revealing that the values of P and R are equal. There-
fore, based on EMF2 , Naïve Bayes has better results than the other
learning techniques for security pattern.
As shown in Fig. 2, in the preprocessing step of the proposed
method, we can optionally use the feature selection both to increase
the classification performance and to reduce the length of the fea-
ture vectors. Therefore, to evaluate the impact of this selection on
the overall performance of the proposed method, we use Document
Frequency (DF), due to its simplicity and effectiveness in the feature
selection (Sebastiani, 2002).
In this case study, the highest value of DF for a term is 16. In
Fig. 8, the changes in P, R and F1 of the Naïve Bayes are displayed with
regards to the changes of term frequency in document (X) and the
number of omitted features (N). For example, in Fig. 8, X equal to 12
means the omission of features that their DF value equals or is more
than 12. In Fig. 8, when X = 10, the values of criteria are: P = 0.94,
R = 0.94, F1 = 0.94, and FP = 0.01, and 2% of the features have been
reduced. As illustrated in Fig. 5, before feature selection, the values

1
1 Naïve R_Naïve Bayes
0.9 Bayes

0.8 0.9
Value of Criterion

0.7 SVM
P_Naïve Bayes
0.6
EMF1

C4.5 0.8
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.7
0.2 F1_Naïve
KNN Bayes
0.1
0 0.6
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4
0 3 7 10 19 59 82 185 N
Value of α 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 X

Fig. 6. EMF1 curve of learning security patterns. Fig. 8. The results of feature selection in Naïve Bayes learning of security patterns.
416 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
Fig. 9. The evaluation results of learning Douglass patterns.
of P and FP are 0.88 and 0.02, respectively also, the comparison
between Fig.s 5 and 8 reveals that removing features with high DF,
leads to decrease in the degree of error (noise), i.e., FP, and increase
in the value of P. When X is in the range of (6, 10), the value of
F1 remains the same as before reduction of features. Therefore, in
this case, the DF method achieves the same previous results in this
range with 10% reduction of features. Hence, if the goal here is to
reduce features highly, the features reduction rate can be increased
from 2% to 10%, thereby it leads to reduction of F1 from 0.94 to 0.91.
Feature selection has also been performed for the other learning
techniques. In this case study, no improvement is observed in SVM.
In C4.5, when X is in the range of (5, 16), the F1 value increases,
when X becomes less than 5, the F1 value decreases. In KNN, when
X is in the range of (10, 16), F1 is constant, in the range of (5, 9) F1
decreases, in the range of (3, 4) F1 increases, and when X becomes
less than 3, F1 begins to decline.
6.1.2. Douglass patterns evaluation
Fig. 9 compares the evaluation results of the four learning tech-
niques, SVM, Naïve Bayes, C4.5, and KNN using Douglass patterns.
As shown in Fig. 9, based on EWM criterion, SVM and Naïve Bayes
are better than the other learning techniques, respectively. In this
case study, the curves of EMF1 and EMF2 for the learning tech-
niques are reported in (CS, 2011). In fact, in this case study, the
evaluation results of Naïve Bayes and SVM learning techniques indi-
cates an ideal mode, because both P and R equals to 1. Therefore,
in terms of EMF1 and EMF2 , these two learning techniques have
better performance than the others for Douglass patterns.
6.1.3. GoF patterns evaluation
Fig. 10 compares the evaluation results of the four learning tech-
niques, SVM, Naïve Bayes, C4.5, and KNN using GoF patterns. As
shown in Fig. 10, based on EWM criterion, SVM and Naïve Bayes
have better results than the others. In this case study, the curves
of EMF1 and EMF2 for the learning techniques are reported in (CS,
2011).
Therefore, our experiments show that based on EMF1 and EMF2
criteria, SVM has better results than the other learning techniques
for GoF patterns. The results of feature selection for two former case
studies are reported in (CS, 2011).
6.2. Learning evaluation using real design problems
In this section, the efficiency of learning techniques in design
patterns class determination will be evaluated using the evaluation
model explained in Section 5.1. Also, in this section classifiers will
be learned based on design patterns groups (one by one) mentioned
Fig. 10. The evaluation results of learning GoF patterns.
in Section 5.3 and will be evaluated using real design problems
mentioned in Section 5.4.
6.2.1. Security patterns evaluation
Having learned eight classifiers, one for each security design
patterns class mentioned in Section 5.3, we used all 22 security
design problems mentioned in Section 5.4, to evaluate the mean
effectiveness of the best learning technique.
The evaluation results of real design problems for each learn-
ing technique are compared in Fig. 11. Our experiments show that
based on the curves of EMF1 and EMF2 (CS, 2011) and EWM in
Fig. 11, SVM has better results than the others in this case study.
Among eight learned SVM classifiers for eight security patterns
classes, Operating System Access Control Patterns Class is the only
suggested class by the proposed method for design problem 1.There-
fore; in this case, the result of the proposed method is the same as
expert opinions.
6.2.2. Douglass patterns evaluation
Having learned five classifiers, one for each Douglass patterns
class mentioned in Section 5.3, we used all 19 Douglass design prob-
lems mentioned in Section 5.4, to evaluate the mean effectiveness
of the best learning technique.
The evaluation results of real design problems for each learning
technique are compared in Fig. 12. Thus, in this case, according to
EMF1 and EMF2 (CS, 2011) and EWM of Fig. 12, the two learning
techniques SVM and Naïve Bayes (with a slight difference) achieve
better results than the other learning techniques.
Fig. 11. The evaluation results of learning security patterns using 22 real design
problems.
 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424 417

Table 2
Cosine similarities between Design Problem 1 and the corresponding problem defi-
nition of Operating System Access Control Patterns.

Operating system access control patterns Cosine similarity

Authenticator Pattern 0.14

Controlled Execution Environment Pattern 0.36
Controlled Object Factory Pattern 0.38
Controlled Object Monitor Pattern 0.55
Controlled Process Creator Pattern 0.80
Controlled Virtual Address Space Pattern 0.25
Execution Domain Pattern 0.39
File Authorization Pattern 0

Table 3
Cosine similarities between Design Problem 2 and the corresponding problem defi-
Fig. 12. The evaluation results of learning Douglass patterns using 19 real design
nition of Distribution Patterns.
problems.
Distribution Patterns Cosine similarity
Among five SVM classifiers for Douglass patterns classes, includ- Broker Pattern 0.16
ing Concurrency, Memory, Resources, Distribution, and Safety and Data Bus Pattern 0.42
Reliability patterns classifier (as shown in Fig. 3), Distribution Pat- Observer Pattern 0.64
Proxy Pattern 0.27
terns Class and Memory Patterns Class are suggested by the proposed
Remote Method Call Pattern 0.11
method for design problem 2 and design problem 3, respectively. Shared Memory Pattern 0.21
Therefore; in these cases, the results of the proposed method are
the same as expert opinions.
Table 4
Cosine similarities between Design Problem 3 and the corresponding problem defi-
6.2.3. GoF patterns evaluation nition of Memory Patterns.
Having learned three classifiers, one for each GoF design pat-
terns class mentioned in Section 5.3, we used all 19 GoF design Memory Patterns Cosine similarity

problems mentioned in Section 5.4, to evaluate the mean effective- Fixed Sized Buffer Pattern 0.62
ness of the best learning technique. Garbage Collection Pattern 0.28
Garbage Compactor Pattern 0.45
The evaluation results of real design problems for each learning
Pool Allocation Pattern 0.18
technique are compared in Fig. 13. Therefore, based on EMF1 and Smart Pointer Pattern 0.57
EMF2 (CS, 2011) and EWM of Fig. 13, SVM has better results than Static Allocation Pattern 0.48
the other learning techniques.
Among three SVM classifiers, including Creational, Structural,
Table 5
and Behavioral Patterns classifier, for GoF patterns classes, Struc- Cosine similarities between Design Problem 4 and the corresponding problem defi-
tural Patterns Class and Behavioral Patterns Class are suggested by nition of Structural Patterns.
the proposed method for design problem 4 and design problem 5,
Structural Patterns Cosine similarity
respectively. Therefore; in these cases, the results of the proposed
method are the same as expert opinions. Adapter Pattern 0.31
Bridge Pattern 0.13
Compose Pattern 0.11
6.3. Evaluation of design pattern(s) selection using real design Decorator Pattern 0
problems Façade Pattern 0.14
Flyweight Pattern 0
To show how the proposed options in Section 4.4 work clearly, Proxy Pattern 0.06

we first follow application of the proposed design pattern selection

method on five real design problems in details. Then, we present
6.3.1. Sample design problems
the results of experimental works on some subset of real design
In Section 5.4, five real design problems are mentioned as sam-
problems mentioned in Section 5.4.
ple design problems. In Section 6.2, for all of them, the proper
design patterns class (type) is identified by the proposed method.
In this section, we report the results of applying the proposed

Table 6
Cosine similarities between Design Problem 5 and the corresponding problem defi-
nition of Behavioral Patterns.

Behavioral Patterns Cosine similarity

Chain of Responsibility Pattern 0.36

Command Pattern 0.25
Interpreter Pattern 0
Iterate Pattern 0.08
Mediator Pattern 0.07
Memento Pattern 0.09
Observer Pattern 0.07
State Pattern 0.07
Strategy Pattern 0.06
Template Method Pattern 0
Fig. 13. The evaluation results of learning GoF patterns using 19 real design prob- Visitor Pattern 0.07
lems.
418 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
Fig. 14. The evaluation of applying Eq. (4) on sample design problems.
options presented in Section 4.4 on these five real design problems.
Tables 2–6 shows the results of cosine similarities between Design
Problem 1 and Operating System Access Control Patterns Class, Design
Problem 2 and Distribution Patterns Class, Design Problem 3 and Mem-
ory Patterns Class, Design Problem 4 and Structural Patterns Class,
Design Problem 5 and Behavioral Patterns Class, respectively, i.e., the
results of the fourth phase of the proposed method (see Fig. 1). In
Tables 2–6, the design pattern that has the highest similarity value
is highlighted.
Figs. 14 and 15 are comparing the results of applying Eqs. (4)
and (3) on five sample design problems presented in Section 5.4,
respectively. In the special case of Fig. 14, when  2 is equal to 0, the
Eq. (4) reduces to Eq. (2).
It is worth to note that, according to expert opinions, the high-
lighted design patterns in Tables 2–6 are correctly determined by
applying Eq. (2) on all five sample design problems. It means that
for these five sample design problems, in the fourth phase of the
proposed method, when choosing the Eq. (2), the highest value of
RCDDP is obtained. In the following, we discuss on the best design
pattern(s) based on different ranges for parameters  1 and  2 .
Analysis of Design Problem 1: In Fig. 15, when  1 is in the range
(0.55, 0.79) and in Fig. 14 for all values of  2 , design problem 1
has the highest value of RCDDP.Analysis of Design Problem 2: In
Fig. 15, when  1 is in the range (0.42, 0.63) and in Fig. 14 for all val-
ues of  2 , design problem 2 has the highest value of RCDDP.Analysis
of Design Problem 3: In Fig. 15, when  1 is in the range (0.57, 0.61),
the highest value of RCDDP is obtained. In Fig. 14, when  2 is in the
range (0, 0.04), the highest value of RCDDP is obtained.Analysis of
Design Problem 4: In Fig. 15, when  1 is in the range (0.14, 0.30)
and in Fig. 14, when  2 is in the range (0, 0.16), the highest value
of RCDDP is obtained.
Fig. 15. The evaluation of applying Eq. (3) on sample design problems.
0.8
RCDDP Criterion
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
Value of θ1
Fig. 16. Mean RCDDP changes for 20 real design problems based on option (B) of
cosine similarity method.
Analysis of Design Problem 5: In Fig. 15, when  1 is in the range
(0.09, 0.35) and in Fig. 14 for all values of  2 , the highest value of
RCDDP is obtained.
It is worth to note that, we clearly explain in detail how the pro-
posed method retrieves the right design patterns for four another
real object-oriented design problems, and how the cosine similar-
ities of these design problems and the GoF patterns are computed
in (CS, 2011).
6.3.2. A subset of design problems
To assess more accurately, 20 design problems are randomly
selected from the 60 real design problems (mentioned in Section
5.4). It is assumed that the design patterns class of each design prob-
lem is correctly detected in the third phase of the proposed method.
Now, all proposed equations in Section 4.4 are evaluated for selec-
tion of the right design pattern(s) for these design problems. The
presented results in this section are the average of RCDDP for all
selected real design problems.
Mean RCDDP changes in terms of different values of  1 and  2 ,
for all options (i.e., Eqs. (2–4)) of cosine similarity (Si ) method are
depicted in Figs. 16–18.
As shown in Fig. 16 (option B), when  1 is considered at 0.4, the
highest value of RCDDP (0.47) is obtained. In Fig. 17 (option C), when
 2 is equal to 0.03, the highest value of RCDDP (0.82) is obtained.
Therefore, we recommend that the values of  1 (for option B) and
 2 (for option C) are equal to 0.4 and 0.03, respectively.
Note that when the value of  2 in option (C) is zero, then option
(C) reduces to option (A). In Fig. 17, the option (A) achieves the value
of 0.79 for RCDDP.
As shown in Fig. 18, when  1 and  2 are respectively equal to
0.3 and 0.03, option (D) achieves the best result (RCDDP is equal
 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
RCDDP Criterion 0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
Value of θ2
Fig. 17. Mean RCDDP changes for 20 real design problems based on option (C) of
cosine similarity method.
to 0.84). The reason is that, for unrelated design problems, the
resemblance of which are less than 0.3 to the design patterns, the
proposed method does not suggest any design patterns, and when
 2 is equal to 0.03, it achieves its maximum effectiveness.
6.4. A summary of the evaluations
According to the analysis performed on each design pattern
group, outlines of the results are as follows:
A. Among four evaluated learning techniques, Naïve Bayes and SVM
achieve better results. Although from these two learning tech-
niques, SVM has better results in more cases, but the efficiency
of each learning technique depends on design pattern groups
under evaluation. Therefore, Section 7 will address to compute
consistency of each design patterns group.
B. In order to increase the effectiveness of learning techniques, for
SVM, TFC, TF and TFIDF weighting methods, and for Naïve Bayes,
TFC, TFIDF and TF weighting methods are respectively suggested.
C. Between SVM and Naïve Bayes learning techniques, SVM is not
sensitive to feature selection (Joachims, 1998), but feature selec-
tion by DF method in case studies reveals that in Naïve Bayes,
with a decrease in features, the evaluation results improve. The
results of feature selection for this learning technique indicates
that if we want to increase the learning precision and decrease
the error rate (FP), the features must reduce as long as the values
of learning precision and error rate reach their maximum and
minimum, respectively. In our experiment to gain maximum
precision and minimum error rate at most 2% of the features
decrease. But if the purpose is omission of the most number of
features (Jalili and Bitarafan, 2006), then we can omit features
Fig. 18. Mean RCDDP changes for 20 real design problems based on option (D) of
cosine similarity method.
419
Fig. 19. The process of the evaluation and anomaly reduction of design patterns
classes made by hand.
as long as the value of P and R (or F1 ) are not less than the corre-
sponding values before features reduction. In our experiment
to gain maximum feature reduction, the number of features
decreases by 10%.
D. According to the performed evaluation in Section 6.3, among the
four proposed options in Section 4.4, the option (D) is suggested
with values of 0.3 and 0.03 for  1 and  2 , respectively. Note that
the effective values of  1 and  2 depend on the selected patterns
group; therefore, to achieve the most suitable values, the devel-
opers need to perform these experiments with sample design
problems as parameters tuning.
7. Consistency evaluation of design patterns classes
In the design patterns learning phase in Section 4.2, a design pat-
terns classification of researchers is used as training sets to learn
their design patterns classes as classifiers. Any deficiency in design
pattern classifications can have many negative effects on the effi-
ciency of the learned classifiers. For example, if the classification
has some inconsistency and considerable overlap between patterns
classes, the results of learned classifiers may be incorrect in the
design patterns class detection.
One of the main shortcomings of the current classifications
made by different researchers is their inconsistency and anomaly
(Hasso and Carlson, 2004, 2005). As a result, before learning clas-
sifiers phase in the proposed method, first each design pattern
classification should be evaluated to measure the classification
consistency, then after removing any anomaly, it is used to learn
the classifiers. For this reason, we propose a novel method that
evaluates and reduces inconsistency of the classifications that are
performed manually by researchers, which is illustrated in Fig. 19.
In this method, we use another machine learning technique,
called Clustering, that Alpaydın (2010) describes it as follows: “Clus-
tering is an unsupervised learning, aims to find K categories (clusters)
or groupings of the input, where K is determined by the user. In docu-
ment clustering, the aim is to group similar documents. For example,
news reports can be subdivided as those related to politics, sports, arts,
and so on.”
As shown in Fig. 19, first the problem definitions of design pat-
terns are clustered for each design pattern group. The number of
clusters (K) is the same as the number of design pattern group
classes made by researchers. After clustering, the results are com-
pared with the classification made by researchers; therefore, it is
possible – and indeed undesirable – to occur some anomalies.
An anomaly means that an object (i.e., a design pattern) belongs
to a class in reality, but it is incorrectly assigned to another class by
the clustering process. To provide an illustration of the clustering
process and the anomaly, Fig. 20 shows the results of the cluster-
ing process for two example object groups that experts subdivided
into three classes earlier. As shown in Fig. 20(a), the comparison
420 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
Fig. 20. Example of the clustering process with 3 clusters (K = 3): (a) no anomaly appeared and (b) one anomaly appeared.
between objects in the generated clusters and objects in the classes
reveals that no anomaly occurred. But, in Fig. 20(b), one anomaly
occurred, because one object of Class 1 is located in Cluster 2 during
the clustering process.
If the number of anomalies is less than the threshold level , the
design pattern consistency evaluation has finished, else the class
which has the highest anomaly is selected as candidate.
We know, in each design pattern class, the cohesion (similarity
of design patterns inside a class) must be high and coupling (simi-
larity of design patterns of a class with the rest of design patterns)
must be low. The class which has the highest anomaly has a low
cohesion and high coupling. Therefore, in the next step, the anoma-
lies of the candidate class design patterns must be eliminated.
To eliminate anomaly, it is recommended that descriptive words
which state the main features (the nature) of a pattern class, and
discriminate words which distinguish a pattern class from other
classes are used inside each class. To improve the problem defi-
nition text of design patterns inside candidate class, the definition
of all design patterns of that class should be rewritten using these
words. This causes the similarity of members inside a class and their
dissimilarity with other classes to be meaningful.
After improving design patterns problem definition of candidate
class, in the next phase, clustering is performed once more time,
and a number of anomalies are calculated. This process is iteratively
performed as long as the number of anomalies becomes less than .
The advantage of using the text clustering is that before applying
the proposed method, the anomaly of the design patterns group can
be evaluated. Also, the different classifications made by researchers
can be verified from viewpoint of the problem definition.
After studying clustering methods, we decide to use Bisection K-
means (RBR) method (Steinbach et al., 2000), because this method
has better performance than Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering
(AHC) and K-means method in the document clustering (Steinbach
et al., 2000). Additionally, we use CLUTO (Karypis, 2002) toolkit for
the clustering process. This tool has a number of criterion func-
tions for clustering methods, and in this study H1 and I2 criterion
functions are used because they have yielded better results.
Below, first the consistency of the three design pattern groups
mentioned in Section 5.3 is evaluated, then the effect of incon-
sistency reduction on the learning techniques evaluation results
will be presented (in these evaluations the threshold level  is
considered as 3 according to the experimental results).
7.1. Consistency evaluation of security patterns classes
The results of primary clustering process with the number of
clusters (K) equal to 8 (because the number of classes in security
patterns group is 8) in this patterns group reveal that 18 of 46
design patterns have anomalies, i.e., during the clustering process,
18 design patterns do not allocate to classes that are assigned by
researchers earlier. In the first phase, the second class (i.e., Identi-
fication and Authentication patterns) has the highest anomaly. After
improving that, the results of clustering indicate 16 inconsistent
design patterns. In the second phase, the seventh class (i.e., Fire-
wall Architecture patterns) has the highest anomaly, and after its
improvement, 14 inconsistent design patterns remain. At the end,
for this pattern group, all classes are improved and the results of
clustering indicate that there is only one inconsistent design pat-
tern. The above-mentioned process reveals that security patterns
group has 39% anomaly.
After improving security patterns group, the learning tech-
niques of security pattern classes are re-evaluated using the
improved patterns group like Section 6.1.1. The results of the eval-
uation indicate that Naïve Bayes, SVM and C4.5 achieve P = 1, R = 1,
F1 = 1, and FP = 0, i.e., an ideal mode, for all mentioned weighting
methods. In KNN, the values of P and R increase in all weighting
methods, but it does not achieve 1 (the ideal mode). The results of
repeating the evaluation in Section 6.2.1 using improved security
patterns group are indicated in Fig. 21.
Comparing Fig. 21 with Fig. 11, reveals that EWM values of all
learning techniques have increased except for C4.5.
Therefore, in terms of EMF1 , EMF2 (CS, 2011), and EWM, Naïve
Bayes has achieved better performance than the other learning
techniques.
7.2. Consistency evaluation of douglass patterns classes
The results of the clustering process with the number of clusters
(K) equal to 5 (because the number of classes in Douglass patterns
group is 5) in these design patterns group indicate that only 2 of
Fig. 21. The evaluation results of learning improved security patterns using 22 real
design problems.
 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
Fig. 22. The evaluation results of learning improved GoF patterns using 19 real
design problems.
34 design patterns are inconsistent in the classification made by
Douglass. This low anomaly (6%) reveals that design patterns in
each class are very similar. Therefore, due to low anomaly, and
because in the stage of the evaluation with its design patterns the
proposed method yielded P = 1 and R = 1, therefore, there is no need
for improvement of problem definition of this group.
7.3. Consistency evaluation of GoF patterns classes
The results of the clustering process with the number of clusters
(K) equal to 3 (because the number of classes in GoF patterns group
is 3) in this design patterns group indicate that there are 9 anoma-
lies from the 23 design patterns in the classification made by the
author. At the first stage, the second class (i.e., Structural Patterns)
has the highest anomaly. After making improvements, the results
of clustering indicate 5 inconsistent design patterns. In the next
stage, the third class (i.e., Creational Patterns) and in the following
stage the first class (i.e., Behavioral Patterns) has been improved.
After improving all classes of the group, the number of anomalies
becomes zero. The above-mentioned process shows that the design
patterns group in GoF book has 39% anomaly.
After improving GoF patterns group, the learning techniques of
these classes are re-evaluated using the improved design patterns
group, like Section 6.1.3. The results of the evaluation indicate that
all learning techniques: Naïve Bayes, SVM, C4.5 and KNN yielded
P = 1 and R = 1 for all of the mentioned weighting methods.
The results of repeating the evaluation in Section 6.2.3 using
improved design patterns group are indicated in Fig. 22.
The comparison of this evaluation results with the evaluation
results presented in Section 6.2.3 (Fig. 13) shows that the results
of Naïve Bayes and SVM have considerably increased in terms of
EMF1 , EMF2 (CS, 2011), and EWM. Thus, SVM has achieved better
performance than the other learning techniques.
7.4. Learning evaluation with real design problems for all
improved pattern groups
In this section, we collect the three design patterns groups men-
tioned in Section 5.3 as a new design patterns group, which consists
of 103 design patterns, i.e., 46 security patterns and 34 Douglass
patterns together with 23 GoF patterns. This new design patterns
group includes 16 design patterns classes, i.e., 8 security patterns
classes and 5 Douglass patterns classes together with 3 GoF pat-
terns classes. It is worth remembering that the improved design
patterns have been used in this section. The evaluation results of
60 real design problems mentioned in Section 5.4 are presented in
Fig. 23.
421
Fig. 23. The evaluation results of learning all improved patterns using 60 real design
problems.
As shown in Fig. 23, the value of EWM in Naïve Bayes is more
than the other learning techniques. But at point ˛ = 1 in EMF1 curve,
and at point ˇ = 0.5 in EMF2 curve, there is slight difference between
SVM and Naïve Bayes (CS, 2011), hence, according to EMF1 and EMF2 ,
these two learning techniques have better results.
7.5. A summary of the evaluations
The important point observed in these evaluations is that
by improving and reducing inconsistencies, the results of Naïve
Bayes was considerably enhanced, and in the evaluation of three
improved pattern groups with real design problems, based on
EWM, EMF1 , and EMF2 , this learning technique achieved better
results in comparison to the other learning techniques. As a result,
we conclude several important consequences. First, when a design
pattern classification is consistent and has low anomaly, Naïve
Bayes has the best results. Second, SVM achieves better results with-
out reduction of inconsistencies. Third, the sensitivity of Naïve Bayes
toward inconsistent data is more than SVM. Finally, Naïve Bayes
keeps the values of criteria P and R close to one another, while SVM
sacrifices criterion R to criterion P.
8. Limitations of the proposed method
In the course of experimentation during the evaluation, a num-
ber of limitations of the proposed method became apparent. First,
the results of applying the learning techniques on each one of the
three design pattern groups reveal that the effectiveness of the
proposed method is dependent on the number of inconsistencies
in the classification of the design patterns group that is chosen.
For example, the results of applying the proposed method on the
Douglass patterns group are better than the results of the GoF pat-
terns group, because the classification of the GoF patterns group has
many inconsistencies and anomalies, in other words, the problem
definitions of the GoF design patterns is weak. Thus, if the problem
definition of design patterns is more complete, the results of the
proposed method improve.
Second, the quality of a given design problem description has
a great impact on the overall quality of the proposed method. For
example, applying the proposed method on design problems 4 and 5
achieved the worst results; see Tables 5 and 6, due to the poor qual-
ity of these design problems. Thus, if the more words of problem
definition of design patterns are used in description of real design
problems, the probability of finding the right design patterns will
be more. To overcome this difficulty, the words that are used in
the problem definition of the used design patterns group should be
collected in a glossary, i.e., Design Patterns Glossary, that available
422 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
to software developers. It is recommended developers make max-
imum use of the glossary to describe design problems to achieve
a better result. Alternatively, in the design problems preprocess-
ing, we could replace the words of the design problem description
by synonym words in the problem definitions of used design pat-
terns group. In this case, instead of forcing the developer to use
the design patterns glossary, a preprocessing to replace terms with
suitable ones is performed on a given design problem.
Finally, another limitation in the proposed method lies in the
fact that there are a couple of books that describe design pat-
terns, but the description of their design patterns is not necessarily
searchable by computer. It is recommended that a pool that consists
of design pattern descriptions is supplied by some large research
centers. Additionally, we recommend that Wikipedia.org, Source-
Forge.Net and other collaborative web-based encyclopedias create
an environment in which software engineers can participate to
complete design pattern descriptions.
9. Related work
The attempts made to automatically select a design pattern are
divided into two approaches, UML-Based (Kim and Khawand, 2007;
Hsueh et al., 2007; Kim and Shen, 2008) and Ontology-Based (Hasso
and Carlson, 2005; Blomqvist, 2008; Hasso and Carlson, 2004;
Khoury et al., 2008) which are discussed in more details below.
In addition, we propose a third approach, called Text Classification.
First approach (UML-Based Approach). Kim and Khawand
(2007) and Kim and Shen (2008) categorized the problem defini-
tion sources into two parts, design pattern problem definition and
known problems for the design pattern. Then, based on the above-
mentioned sources they have used an abstract Meta-model to
formalize design patterns. The Meta-model has been inspired from
structure (class diagram) and behavior (collaboration diagram) of
a software document. In this work, it has been attempted to make
abstract statement of design patterns structure, and pattern detec-
tion is performed according to UML diagrams. This approach has a
number of limitations. First, it has limited to precisely specify the
problem definition of all design patterns, because the created Meta-
model may be the same for some design patterns, for example, it
seems likely that the Meta-model for State Pattern (from Gamma
et al. book (Gamma et al., 1994)) is the same as the one for Strat-
egy Pattern (from Gamma et al. book (Gamma et al., 1994)), and
another example is that the Meta-models for three design patterns,
Bridge, Factory Method and Abstract Factory (from Gamma et al. book
(Gamma et al., 1994)) are the same. The reason for this difficulty is
that the structure of the problem definition of these design patterns
is the same from viewpoint of UML diagrams, but their purposes are
different (Kampffmeyer and Zschaler, 2007). Moreover, for many
object-oriented design patterns (Gamma et al., 1994), for example,
Façade, Flyweight, Decorator, and Prototype patterns, a Meta-model
cannot be offered. But in our proposed method, because of the
capability of stating any type of problem in text structure, there
is no such limitation. Second, this approach is not scalable due
to increase in the similarities of the Meta-models for great num-
ber of design patterns, but as already observed in Section 7.4, our
proposed method can be extended to a large number of design
patterns.
Third, the cost of creating a Meta-model for each design pattern
is too high, while our proposed method requires less professional
working on the design pattern problem definition and in general
needs low cost. Fourth, in this work, the design pattern(s) is not
suggested along with its similarity to the design problem, while
our proposed method suggest different design patterns according
to the extent of similarity between the problem definition of the
retrieved design pattern and the design problem. Fifth, it is just
applicable in object-oriented design patterns with explaining their
solution in UML, while our proposed method can be applied on
any kind of design patterns. Last, the Meta-model creation stage for
each design pattern is not automatic, while all steps of our proposed
method are performed automatically.
Following the first approach, Hsueh et al. (2007) used the differ-
ent design pattern viewpoints, aim at finding a systematic method
to select right design patterns, consist of Activity-view to see
how a design pattern can facilitate a design activity, Requirement-
view to explore how a design pattern can enhance non-functional
requirements, Problem-view to investigate how a design pattern
can resolve design problems and prevent exceptions, and Tradeoff-
view to see how a design pattern can resolve design conflict. After
that, the authors suggested a goal-driven framework based on
UML diagrams, includes three stages, modeling requirements, objects
analysis, and objects design, for object-oriented process design. This
work has a number of limitations. First, an evaluation of this work
has been done only by one case study and a limited number of
design patterns. Second, this work does not suggest an automatic
way to select the design patterns and it is a framework to help the
developer to detect the right pattern. Last, this work has the limi-
tations 2, 4 and 5 mentioned for the method of Kim and Khawand
(2007) and Kim and Shen (2008).
Second approach (Ontology-Based Approach). Hasso and
Carlson (2005) and Hasso and Carlson (2004) have suggested a
classification on design patterns based on the meaning of design
pattern problem definition and semantic analysis of its sentences.
In this work, the classification is made based on the meaning of
verbs in the design pattern problem definition, uses linguistic theo-
ries in semantic analysis of sentence structure. The authors claimed
that the right design pattern can be detected through the semantic
classification of design patterns, but they have not presented any
evaluation of their method, and it is noted that the classification is
not automatic.
Khoury et al. (2008) suggested an interesting method based on
Ontology Web Language (OWL), uses an ontological interface for
software developers to select security patterns, aims at providing
mapping between requirements from one side and threat models,
security bugs, security errors on another side taking into considera-
tion their contexts of applicability. This wok has two shortcomings;
first, it is need to formal specifications of security concepts and
security requirements like confidentiality. Nevertheless, there are
no formal descriptions in all software design domains, and then
it leads to a limitation to apply this work in practice. However, in
our proposed method, there is no need for formal specifications of
design patterns. Second, the authors did not report the effectiveness
of the method.
Blomqvist (2008) suggested a method for automatic selection of
right design patterns, uses ontology of design patterns to rank of
the right design patterns. Blomqvist used some criteria for ranking
the design patterns; include class matches, centrality, density and
semantic similarity. However, this work has a number of limitations
similar to the ones of Khoury et al. (2008).
At the end, the comparison between our purposed method and
second approach are presented below.
First, the second approach suffers from lack of a single ontology
for each of the sections of a domain, while in our proposed method;
there is no need for a single ontology. Second, the cost of ontology
creation is too high, while our proposed method needs less pro-
fessional work on design patterns and in general lower cost. Last,
the second approach has a number of difficulties in automation of
its process which are explained in more detail in Blomqvist (2008).
For example, the output of most ontology approaches is diverse and
lacks proper structure, thereby requiring manual post-processing
and after extracting the problem definition (Blomqvist, 2008), then,
it needs manual addition of concepts, while our proposed method
does not have any of these difficulties.
 S.M.H. Hasheminejad, S. Jalili / The Journal of Systems and Software 85 (2012) 408–424
Third approach (Text Classification Approach). The proposed
method uses the third approach, i.e., the text classification of the
problem definition of design patterns, to increase efficiency and
automation of right pattern selection. The proposed method has
advantages over the similar works. First, there is no need to for-
mal specifications of design pattern problem definition. Second, not
only it is applicable on any kind of design pattern, but also it can
be used in selecting library routines. Third, it can suggest different
design patterns according to the extent of similarity between the
problem definition of the retrieved design pattern and the design
problem. Fourth, the proposed method presents a systematic way
to evaluate and improve inconsistencies in the manual classifica-
tions made by researchers
Fifth, it has simple automation of pattern selection process and it
is low costs in comparison to other approaches. Last, it is applicable
for a large number of design patterns, i.e., it is scalable.
The considerable point in this research in comparison to sim-
ilar works is that the proposed method has been evaluated with
three pattern groups and enough design problems, but in all similar
works only a weak evaluation is performed. Therefore, to provide
for the conditions of an equal evaluation, there needs to be a com-
mon benchmark.
10. Conclusions
The experimental results show that the proposed method based
on the text classification approach appears to be a highly promis-
ing basis for selecting a right design pattern for a given design
problem. The text classification approach supports the design pattern
selection method with a low cost preprocessing, thus it is faster, sim-
pler, and less costly than other approaches. The proposed method
was evaluated by using three design pattern groups and enough
real design problem descriptions, but since previous research
works are not evaluated based on known real design problems,
so we present the advantages of our work just in a qualitative
way.
The proposed method has four phases, Preprocessing, Learn-
ing Design Patterns Classifiers, Determination of a Design Patterns
Class, and Suggestion of Design Pattern(s). To evaluate the proposed
method, an evaluation model was proposed. The main goal of the
evaluation is to show the effectiveness of the proposed method, to
determine the best learning technique compatible with the design
pattern selection and the best weighting method for each learning
technique.
According to the obtained results, we conclude several impor-
tant consequences. First, when a design pattern classification is
consistent and has a low anomaly, Naïve Bayes has the best results.
Second, SVM achieves better results without reduction of incon-
sistencies. Third, the sensitivity of Naïve Bayes toward inconsistent
data is more than SVM. Also, Naïve Bayes keeps the values of criteria
P and R close to one another, while SVM sacrifices criterion R to cri-
terion P. Finally, SVM is not sensitive to the feature selection, while
the reduction of features in Naïve Bayes improves the evaluation
results.
In a future work, we intend to use a combination of Naïve
Bayes and Support Vector Machine (NB-SVM) methods to train a
classifier to improve the performance of the proposed method.
Moreover, we are going to use two adjacent words instead of sin-
gle word in feature vector (Jalili and Bitarafan, 2006) to improve the
results.
Acknowledgement
This Project has been supported in part by Iran Telecommuni-
cation Research Center (ITRC).
423
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Trowbridge, D., Cunningham, W., Brader, L., Slater, P., 2006. Describing the Enter- University (TMU). He received the M.Sc. degree in Soft-
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default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpag/html/entarch.asp. in Software Engineering from Tarbiat Moalem University
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Adaptive Systems.
Saeed Jalili received the Ph.D. degree from Bradford Uni-
versity (UK) in 1991 and the M.Sc. degree in computer
science from Sharif University of Technology in 1985.
Since 1992, he has been Associate Professor at Tarbiat
Modares University (TMU). His main research interests are
Self-* Systems, Software Runtime Verification, and Quan-
titative Evaluation of Software Architecture.