Design pattern recommendation based-on a pattern usage hierarchy

Design patterns for software development provide general reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems. They are useful for developing flexible, reusable and modular software with object-oriented programming. Selecting an appropriate design pattern is however a difficult task, especially for novice designers. In order to apply a pattern to a given problem context, a designer necessarily understand not only a problem domain but also the usage and structure of the pattern. To facilitate pattern selection, we construct a pattern usage hierarchy, based on which a problem-driven framework for recommending design patterns is developed. The characteristics of tasks to be performed in a given problem and examples of pattern usage are used for retrieving user intention and for matching the problem with an appropriate pattern. Results of a subjective evaluation of the framework are reported.