Design pattern directed clustering for understanding open source code

Program understanding plays an important role in the maintenance and reuse of open source code. Rapid evolving and bad documentation makes the understanding and reusing difficult. Design patterns are widely employed in the open source code. In this paper, we propose a design pattern directed clustering approach to help understand the structure of open source code. According to the approach, we have implemented a prototype tool. We also conducted an experiment on an open source system to evaluate it.