Discovering design patterns in software behavior models
Sandeep Mitra, T. Mahadeva Rao · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2017
The ability to develop extensible and maintainable code is a skill sought by many employers. While students are expected to obtain these skills in software engineering-oriented courses, many small colleges with traditional computer science programs find it challenging to offer multiple courses that cover software engineering concepts in depth. We address this challenge in part by offering a two-course sequence, the first of which teaches the development of high-quality software behavior models using UML sequence diagrams. The second course focuses on the mapping of these models to extensible and maintainable code. In this paper, we describe how discovering design patterns in these models is a key aspect of this mapping process. We assess our approach by evaluating the quality of the code developed in term projects after our techniques were adopted vs. the same in earlier projects. We also describe the results of seeking student reflections on the effectiveness of our approach.