A Methodology for Building a Repository of Object-Oriented Design Fragments

Reuse is as an important approach to conceptual object-oriented design. A number of reusable artifacts and methodologies to use these artifacts have been developed that require the designer to select a certain level of granularity and a certain paradigm. This makes retrieval and application of these artifacts difficult and prevents the simultaneous reuse of artifacts at different levels of granularity. A specific kind of artifact, analysis pattern, spans these levels of granularity. Patterns, which represent groups of objects, facilitate further assembly into what we call design fragments. Design fragments can then be used as reusable artifacts in their own right. A methodology for building a repository of design fragments is presented that consists of core and variant design fragments. The effectiveness of the methodology is assessed by verifying the appropriateness of the design fragments generated through a clustering process.