Journal of Computer Science and Technology ›› 2020, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (5): 963-978.doi: 10.1007/s11390-020-0407-4

Special Issue: Software Systems

• Special Section on Software Systems 2020—Part 1 •     Next Articles

Mining Design Pattern Use Scenarios and Related Design Pattern Pairs: A Case Study on Online Posts

Dong Liu1, Zhi-Lei Ren1,2,*, Member, CCF, ACM, Zhong-Tian Long3, Guo-Jun Gao1, and He Jiang1,2, Member, CCF, ACM, IEEE        

  1. 1 School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China;
    2 Key Laboratory for Ubiquitous Network and Service Software of Liaoning Province, Dalian 116000, China;
    3 DUT-RU International School of Information Science & Engineering at DUT, Dalian University of Technology Dalian 116620, China
  • Received:2020-02-27 Revised:2020-07-31 Online:2020-09-20 Published:2020-09-29
  • Contact: Zhi-Lei Ren E-mail:zren@dlut.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2018YFB1003903, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61722202 and 61772107.

In common design pattern collections, e.g., design pattern books, design patterns are documented with templates that consist of multiple attributes, such as intent, structure, and sample code. To adapt to modern developers, the depictions of design patterns, especially some specific attributes, should advance with the current programming technologies, for example, “known uses”, which exemplifies the use scenarios of design patterns in practice, and “related patterns”, which describes the relatedness between a design pattern and the others within a context. However, it is not easy to update the contents of these attributes manually due to the diversity of the programming technologies. To address this problem, in this work, we conducted a case study to mine design pattern use scenarios and related design pattern pairs from Stack Overflow posts to enrich the two attributes. We first extracted the question posts relevant to each design pattern by identifying the design pattern tags. Then, the topics of the posts were discovered by applying topic modeling techniques. Finally, by analyzing the topics specified for each design pattern, we detected 195 design pattern use scenarios and 70 related design pattern pairs, involving 61 design patterns totally. These findings are associated with a variety of popular software frameworks and programming techniques. They could complement the existing design pattern collections and help developers better acknowledge the usage and relatedness of design patterns in today's programming practice.

Key words: design pattern; software documentation; Stack Overflow; topic model;

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