Extracting the Software Elements and Design Patterns From the Software Field

Deriving the class structure of object-oriented software has been studied intensively. We have proposed a methodology to divide the conceptual model used in the object-oriented analysis into basic elements, such as classes, attributes, methods, relations, and to define constraint characteristics and constructing operations on each element. In the methodology, we have applied the field theory in the quantum physics to software and proposed the software field concepts (Ohki and Kambayashi, 2002a). Our thesis is that software is a kind of fields in which software elements, such as methods and attributes, interact each other to produce certain behavioral patterns. The methodology explains well the characteristics of class libraries (Ohki and Kambayashi, 2002b). Once the software elements are extracted from the software field, the methodology allows constructing design patterns from the characteristics of the elements (Ohki and Kambayashi, 2002a). Although we defined the extract operations to elicit the software elements, we failed to show that those operations have reasons and are correct (Ohki and Kambayashi, 2002a). In order to overcome this problem, in this paper, we introduce the distribution functions to represent the software elements, and to formulate the interactions of the functions. Using the distribution functions and the interactions between them, we have succeeded to suggest how to extract the software elements from the software field, and how to derive the design patterns by using the characteristics of the extract elements. This paper first describes the basic concepts of the software field, and then introduces the distribution functions to represent the software elements. In the latter part of this paper describes that it is applicable to derive typical design patterns.