Title: Supporting design patterns in source code by means of intention-based documentation
Original title: Unterstützung von Entwurfsmustern im Quelltext durch bedeutungsorientierte Dokumentation
Language: German
Author: Diplom-Informatiker Klaus Meffert
Year: 2009

The significance of extendable and maintainable software rises with the growing complexity of technologies. Numerous approaches support developers to create software with these characteristics. One such approach is given with design patterns. They help in reducing the problem of architectural decay, which comes naturally from escalating entropy and complexity during the process of software development. The number of to-date documented design patterns raises through new publications steadily. Thus, the selection of applicable patterns for a given use case becomes more difficult. Besides, the limited support for developers when working with design patterns in practice does not reflect the massive effort put into this issue by academic research.
This work contributes to a better support of patterns with arbitrary granularity in the developer’s daily work. Focus lies on the formal documentation of patterns in order to determine their applicability for a given object-oriented source code and to apply them on a tool-basis with help of source code transformations. This work provides a method for enriching source code with semantic information that is seen as valuable for the processes of selecting and applying a pattern. The present work is suited for source code reviews and thus covers the forward and reengineering phase during software development.