The evaluation of design pattern recovery techniques and tools is significant as numbers of emergent techniques are presented and used in the past to recover patterns from source code of legacy applications. The problem of very diverse precision and recall values extracted by different pattern recovery techniques and tools on the same examined applications is not investigated thoroughly. It is very desirable to compare features of existing techniques as abundance of techniques supplemented with different tools has been presented in the last decade. We believe that new innovations for this discipline can be based on the empirical evaluation of existing techniques. The selected techniques cover the whole spectrum of state of the art research in design pattern recovery. The major contribution of this paper is a comprehensive discussion on state of the art in design pattern recovery research in the last decade followed by a proposed framework for classification and evaluation of existing design pattern recovery techniques. Finally we listed our observations as lessons learned which hamper design pattern recovery research and these observations can be used for future research directions and guidelines for this discipline
