Electronic Communications of the EASST 
Volume 59 (2013) 

Guest Editors: Aminata Sabané, Wei Wu 
Managing Editors: Tiziana Margaria, Julia Padberg, Gabriele Taentzer 
ECEASST Home Page: http://www.easst.org/eceasst/ ISSN 1863-2122 

 

Special Issue of the 
First Workshop on Patterns Promotion 

and Anti-patterns Prevention 
(PPAP 2013) 

Preface 
 

4 Pages 



 
 

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Preface 
 
 

On the 5th of March, 2013, the first workshop on Patterns Promotion and Anti-patterns 
Prevention (PPAP 2013) took place in Genova, Italy. PPAP 2013 was co-located with the 17th 
European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR'2013), the premier 
European conference on the theory and practice of maintenance, reengineering and evolution 
of software systems. 
 
With the aim of promoting the application of patterns and prevent the spread of anti-patterns, 
the first objective of PPAP is to build a bridge between the different families of patterns and 
anti-patterns in software engineering. Relevant topics include but are not limited to: 

 definition and detection; 
 impact on software quality, testing; 
 application and refactoring; 
 empirical studies; 
 evolution; 

of patterns and anti-patterns in software engineering. 
 
For this purpose, the first PPAP workshop intended to provide a place to discuss possible 
interactions between patterns and anti-patterns across different domains and how they could 
benefit from one another. In particular, researchers working on patterns and anti-patterns in 
different domains in software engineering could share their experiences as well as compare 
their results. In addition, we believe that emerging patterns and anti-patterns could benefit 
from the past lessons and successes of their predecessors. 
 
PPAP 2013 attracted 30 participants and 5 papers were presented. The titles of the accepted 
papers were: 
 

 "SQL Pattern Organization and Presentation", by Huda Al-Shuaily and Karen Renaud; 

 "PatEvol - A Pattern Language for Evolution in Component-Based Software 
Architectures", by Aakash Ahmad, Pooyan Jamshid, Claus Pahl, and Fawad Khaliq; 

 "An Approach to Formalise Security Patterns", by Luis Sergio da Silva Junior, Yann-
Gaël Guéhéneuc, and John Mullins; 

 "Analysing Anti-patterns Static Dependencies", by Fehmi Jaafar, Yann-Gaël 
Guéhéneuc, and Sylvie Hamel; 

 "Influence of numerical thresholds on model-based detection and refactoring of 
performance antipatterns", by Davide Arcelli, Vittorio Cortellessa, and Catia Trubiani. 

 

PPAP 2013 was honoured by two keynote speakers. The first keynote was given by Rudolf 
Ferenc, assistant professor at the Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged, 
Hungary. Rudolf is a well-known pattern-related researcher. He leads several R&D projects 



 
 
PPAP 2013: Preface 

Proc. PPAP 2013 3 / 4 

which are related to quality assessment, the improvement and architecture reconstruction of 
software systems of major banks, and software development companies in Hungary. His talk 
was about the effect of design patterns on software maintainability: 
 
Title: Myth or Reality? The Effect of Design Pattern Usage on Software Maintainability 
 
Abstract: Although the belief of utilizing design patterns to create better quality software is 
fairly widespread, there are relatively few research papers objectively indicating that their 
usage is indeed beneficial. In this talk we will try to reveal the connection between design 
patterns and software maintainability. For this sake, we have performed two experiments. 
 
First, we have analyzed more than 300 revisions of JHotDraw, a Java GUI framework whose 
design heavily relies on some well-known design patterns. We used our probabilistic software 
quality model for estimating maintainability and we parsed the javadoc annotations of the 
source code for gathering pattern instances. The Pearson correlation of the design pattern line 
density and the maintainability values revealed an interesting relationship. 
 
Second, we have measured the maintainability of the software systems in DBP – the Design 
Pattern detection tools Benchmark platform – and calculated the correlations of the 
maintainability values with the numbers of the detected design pattern usages. We checked the 
results of four tools: DPD tool, Web Of Patterns, P-MARt, and MARPLE-DPD. Again, the 
outcomes are noteworthy. But after considering only the hand-validated true pattern instances, 
the results are becoming really exciting. 
 
The second keynote was given by Radu Marinescu, associate professor at the Politehnica 
University of Timisoara, co-founder and head (since 2002) of the LOOSE Research Group and 
co-founder of Intooitus, a young spin-off company creating disruptive quality assessment 
tools. Radu was one of the precursor in the automated detection of anti-patterns. He shared his 
experience about design flaws detection: 
 
Title: Assessing technical debt by identifying design flaws in software systems 
 
Abstract: Tough time-to-market constraints and unanticipated integration or evolution issues 
lead to design tradeoffs that usually cause flaws in the structure of a software system. Thus, 
maintenance costs grow significantly. The impact of these design decisions, which provide 
short-term benefits at the expense of the system’s design integrity, is usually referred to as 
technical debt. In this paper, I propose a novel framework for assessing technical debt using a 
technique for detecting design flaws, i.e., specific violations of well-established design 
principles and rules. To make the framework comprehensive and balanced, it is built on top of 
a set of metrics-based detection rules for well-known design flaws that cover all of the major 
aspects of design such as coupling, complexity, and encapsulation. I demonstrate the 
effectiveness of the framework by assessing the evolution of technical debt symptoms over a 
total of 63 releases of two popular Eclipse® projects. The case study shows how the 
framework can detect debt symptoms and past refactoring actions. The experiment also 
reveals that in the absence of such a framework, restructuring actions are not always coherent 
and systematic, not even when performed by very experienced developers. 



 
 

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Besides paper presentations and keynotes, the workshop included two working sessions where 
participants were invited to discuss future research on patterns and anti-patterns.  In the 
following, we summarize the main results of the discussions:  

 We researchers must observe more; new patterns/anti-patterns must be defined based 
on the good/poor practices of practitioners rather than only to promote/prevent 
existing patterns/anti-patterns.  

 Context-aware patterns/anti-patterns are needed, because a solution may not always be 
good/poor in different domains.   

 Formalizing patterns/anti-patterns definition has the benefit of facilitating the 
automation of operations on them, such as detection and application.   

 More empirical studies are needed showing (1) causality of the benefit of patterns and 
of the negative impacts of anti-patterns on different quality aspect of software and (2) 
the possible contagiousness of anti-patterns on other program entities of source code 
are required. Such studies would better help the practitioners and managers make more 
rational decisions regarding patterns and anti-patterns. 

 Further research was suggested on how to combine and apply patterns on real systems 
including support tools for such implementation.  

 Finally, participants highlighted that patterns are learned better through struggling than 
mentoring, thus we must consider the learning strategies when promoting the benefit 
of patterns. 

 
Three of the five accepted papers are extended for this special issue. We would like to thank 
the program committee for their detailed and constructive reviews: Giuliano Antoniol, Yann-
Gaël Guéhéneuc, Foutse Khomh, Naouel Moha, Leon Moonen, Daniele Romano, Lionel 
Seinturier, Nikolaos Tsantalis, Aiko Yamashita, and Andy Zaidman. 
 
We also thank all the authors and participants for their contribution and participation. 
 
PPAP Organizing Committee: 
Surafel Lemma Abebe, Venera Arnaoudova, Laleh Eshkevari, Aminata Sabané, Wei Wu