DPS: Design Pattern Summarisation Using Code Features
Automatic summarisation has been used effectively in recent years to condense texts, conversations, audio, code, and various other artefacts. A range of methods, from simple template-based summaries to complex machine learning techniques—and more recently, large language models—have been employed to generate these summaries. Summarising software design patterns is important because it helps developers quickly understand and reuse complex design concepts, thereby improving software maintainability and development efficiency. However, the generation of summaries for software design patterns has not yet been explored. Our approach utilises code features and JavaParser to parse the code and create a JSON representation. Using an NLG library on this JSON representation, we convert it into natural language text that acts as a summary of the code, capturing the contextual information of the design pattern. Our empirical results indicate that the summaries generated by our approach capture the context in which patterns are applied in the codebase. Statistical evaluations demonstrate that our summaries closely align with human-written summaries, as evident from high values in the ROUGE-L, BLEU-4, NIST and FrugalScore metrics. A follow-up survey further shows that DPS summaries were rated as capturing context better than human-generated summaries. Additionally, a time-based task shows that the summaries reduce the time required for developers to understand design patterns compared with their absence. To our knowledge, this work presents the first automated approach to summarising software design patterns by linking pattern-detection features with natural-language generation. Unlike existing design-pattern detection or code summarisation methods that address these tasks separately, DPS introduces a feature-driven integration that converts detected pattern structures into contextual summaries describing the roles, relationships, and usage intent of each pattern instance.
Mon 13 AprDisplayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change
11:00 - 12:30 | Session 5 - Summarization, Documentation, and Code ReviewResearch Track / Vaclav Rajlich Early Career Award / ICPC Program / Journal First at Europa II Chair(s): Masud Rahman Dalhousie University | ||
11:00 10mTalk | Vaclav Rajlich Award Vaclav Rajlich Early Career Award Marvin Wyrich Saarland University | ||
11:10 10mTalk | RepoMind: Enhancing Repository-Level Code Generation via LLM Reasoning over Structured Repository Documentation Research Track Songwen Gong South China University of Technology, Mengzhen Wang South China University of Technology, Jiexin Wang South China University of Technology, Yi Cai School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China | ||
11:20 10mTalk | SQL-Commenter: Aligning Large Language Models for SQL Comment Generation with Direct Preference Optimization Research Track Lei Yu Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Peng Wang Institute of Information Engineering,Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jingyuan Zhang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Xin Wang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jia Xu Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Li Yang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changzhi Deng Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jiajia Ma Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Fengjun Zhang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Pre-print Media Attached File Attached | ||
11:30 10mTalk | Studying Quality Improvements Recommended via Manual and Automated Code Review Research Track Giuseppe Crupi Università della Svizzera italiana, Rosalia Tufano Università della Svizzera Italiana, Gabriele Bavota Software Institute @ Università della Svizzera Italiana Pre-print | ||
11:40 10mTalk | Towards Universal Segmentation for Log Parsing Research Track Van-Hoang Le University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Domenico Bianculli University of Luxembourg, Huy-Trung Nguyen Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology Pre-print | ||
11:50 10mTalk | DPS: Design Pattern Summarisation Using Code Features Journal First Najam Nazar Monash University, Sameer Sikka University of Melbourne, Christoph Treude Singapore Management University | ||
12:00 10mTalk | On the Impact of Code Comments for Automated Bug-Fixing: An Empirical Study Research Track Antonio Vitale Politecnico di Torino, University of Molise, Emanuela Guglielmi University of Molise, Simone Scalabrino University of Molise, Rocco Oliveto University of Molise Pre-print | ||
12:10 20mLive Q&A | Joint QA and Discussion ICPC Program | ||