The identification of design pattern instances is important for program understanding and software maintenance. Aiming at the mining of design patterns in existing systems, this paper proposes a sub|graph isomorphism approach to discover several design patterns in a legacy system at a time. The attributed relational graph is used to describe design patterns and legacy systems. The sub|graph isomorphism approach consists of decomposition and composition process. During the decomposition process, graphs corresponding to the design patterns are decomposed into sub|graphs, some of which are graphs corresponding to the elemental design patterns. The composition process tries to get sub|graph isomorphism of the matched graph if sub|graph isomorphism of each sub|graph is obtained. Due to the common structures between design patterns, the proposed approach can reduce the matching times of entities and relations. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed algorithm is not linearly dependent on the number of design pattern graphs.
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