Extending UML to improve the representation of design patterns

Abstract

Several design patterns are defined to make systems more flexible and extensible. The main goal of this work is to show how the representation of these kinds of patterns, which we refer to as configuration design patterns, can be vastly improved through extensions to the diagrams used to model them. An extension to the UML design notation to better represent configuration patterns is proposed and illustrated through examples of well-known design patterns and real-world frameworks. The article also shows that the proposed representation can be more easily mapped to new implementation techniques such as Aspect-Oriented Programming and Subject-Oriented Programming.