A Transformational Approach to Structural Design Assessment and Change

摘要

Complexity is a substantive barrier to program and software system recovery, understanding, assessment, and change. We deal with these issues by using a transformational approach to structural design based on design/architectural pattern structures [4]. Our approach allows these structures to be recovered and manipulated. In this way, good and bad patterns in a software system can be found and/or changed though transformations. Such design and architectural structures are used as a basis to assess the design and architectural quality and to structurally build and change the software system. We have some experience in using these pattern-based structures, both in the object-oriented design and architectural level. It is worthwhile to highlight some of them: a pattern-based approach to software understanding based on reverse engineering [1]; models or (formal) representations of these structures to provide support for assessing the quality of a design through a reasoning-based analysis [2]; mechanisms to find and change design structures within a transformational approach [1, 3].