Question

Our team is doing reverse-engineering on a application with virtually non-existant documentation. We want to detect if there’s a use of architectural or design patterns. You may understand that this application is large, so looking manually is no sense for us.

This application is written in Java and we use Eclipse for IDE, so it may be a plugin for Eclipse.

We have found some tools, like “Design Patterns detections Similarity Scoring”, but it’s not working very well.

So, such tools do exists?

Answer 1

If you have the source code of the app, you are most probably reengineering it, rather than reverse engineering. (The latter means recovering some sort of higher level code from machine- or bytecode).

At any rate, you want to understand the application, i.e. build a mental model of it in your mind. I am afraid automatic tools aren’t of much help in this. What use would it be for you to get a list of supposed patterns in the code? Would it help you understand better what the code actually does and why? Especially taking into account the high chances of patterns being misused in legacy code 🙁

In the end, you need to get down to reading the code anyway. But here is another similar thread which hopefully helps in the daunting task of taking over a legacy app.