An Eclipse plug-in for the detection of design pattern instances through static and dynamic analysis

The extraction of design pattern information from software systems can provide conspicuous insight to software engineers on the software structure and its internal characteristics. In this demonstration we present ePAD, an Eclipse plug-in for recovering design pattern instances from object-oriented source code. The tool is able to recover design pattern instances through a structural analysis performed on a data model extracted from source code, and a behavioral analysis performed through the instrumentation and the monitoring of the software system. ePAD is fully configurable since it allows software engineers to customize the design pattern recovery rules and the layout used for the visualization of the recovered instances.