Can design patterns detection be useful for system migration to SOA?

Legacy systems maintenance involves different decisions, often very complex and sometimes requiring high costs and time. Hence studying and applying the right system modernization technique becomes very important for systems evolution. One of the solutions often adopted to modernize a system is the possibility to migrate it towards a SOA architecture. A lot of works in the literature have been done in this direction, which propose methodologies that provide some kind of migration strategy. In the migration process one of the main tasks is related to system comprehension. We often have to analyze not well documented systems, where it is difficult to identify the components which could become services or to recognize the possible problems we could face during the migration process. Software architecture reconstruction is certainly a relevant key activity, which is used for these purposes. In this paper we explore if design pattern detection could be also useful in the migration process: knowing that some design patterns have been applied in the system could give relevant hints to take decisions during migration.