Abstract  As  part  of  the  reengineering  process,  the  identific ation  of  design  patterns  offers  important  informati on  to  the  designer. In fact, the identification of implemente d design patterns could be useful for the comprehen sion of an existing design  and  provides  the  grounds  for  further  code/design  im provements.  However,  existing  pattern  detection  app roaches  generally  have  problems  in  detecting  patterns  in  an  optimal  m anner.  They  either  detect  exact  pattern  instantiations  or  have  no  guidelines  in  deciding  which  pattern  to  look  for  fi rst  amongst  the  various  patterns.  To  overcome  these   two  limitations,  we  propose to optimize any pattern detection approach  by preceding it by a preliminary “sniffing” step that detects the potential  existence  of  patterns  and  orders  the  candidate  patt erns  in  terms  of  their  degree  of  resemblance  to  des ign  fragments.  Our  approach uses design metrics to characterize the st ructure and semantics of the various design pattern s.    

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[36] WordNet., available at: https://wordnet.princeton.edu/, last visited 2013. Imene Issaoui is preparing a Doctorate degree in Computer Science at the Faculty of Economic Sciences and Management of Sfax, Tunisia. She is a Teaching Assistant at the Institut Preparatory to engineering studies of the University of Monastir, Tunisia. Nadia Bouassida received a Phd in Computer and Information Science from the University of Science of Tunis, Tunisia. Currently, she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Institut Sup rieur d'Informatique et du Multim dia at the University of Sfax, Tunisia . She is a member of the Multimedia, Information systems and Advanced Computing Laboratory, University of Sfax Her research interests include r euse techniques, such as design patterns, Frameworks and Software Product Lines. Hanene Ben-Abdallah received a BS degree in Computer Science and BS degree in Mathematics from the University of Minnesota, MPLS, MN, a MSE and PhD degrees in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania, PA. She worked at University of Sfax, Tunisia from 1997 until 2013. She is now full professor at the Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She is a member of the Multimedia, Information Systems and Advanced Computing Laboratory, University of Sfax. Her research interests include software design quality, reuse techniques in softwa re and business process modelling.