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Design patterns play a key role in software development process. The interest in extracting design pattern instances from object-oriented software has increased tremendously in the last two decades. Design patterns enhance program understanding, help to document the systems and capture design trade-offs.

This paper provides the current state of the art in design patterns detection. The selected approaches cover the whole spectrum of the research in design patterns detection. We noticed diverse accuracy values extracted by different detection approaches. The lessons learned are listed at the end of this paper, which can be used for future research directions and guidelines in the area of design patterns detection.