U S WEST Advanced Technologies
Patterns Information Page
It is maintained by Mary Lynn Manns
but the page belongs to AT
so please feel free to send comments and suggestions for adding items to
this page to
mxmanns@advtech.uswest.com
What can you find?
Why patterns?
Some links to interesting pattern web sites
FAQs about patterns
Patterns events at U S WEST AT
Patterns are about what works. Patterns give us a way to talk about
what works. … [After creating the patterns]
we can then use these artifacts off the shelf, and focus our design energy
on ever loftier architectural
concerns.
Human communication is the bottleneck in software development. …
Patterns capture established practices that
remain obscure in the broad practice of a given domain.
Patterns express the understanding gained from practice in software
design and construction. Writing them is a
good way to deepen, structure, and pass on the system skills we build up
and call ‘expertise’ or even
‘intuition’.
What is so exciting about patterns? It is probably the fact that
they constitute a ‘grass roots’ effort to build on the
collective experience of skilled designers and software engineers. Such
experts already have solutions to many recurring
design problems. Patterns capture these proven solutions in an
easily-available and, hopefully, well-written
form.
We have not attempted to measure the impact of patterns on
productivity but we have noticed that communication
between people with a ‘shared space’ of patterns is quicker, more
complete, and less likely to be misunderstood. At the
programming level, we have had people design what might be rather complex
designs much more quickly than expected
by using one or more design patterns.
Brian Foote in Pattern Languages of Program Design 3
James Coplien (of Bell Labs) in Software Patterns
Frank Buschmann (of Siemens)
Buschmann et al. in Pattern-oriented Software Architecture: A System
of Patterns
Gerard Meszaros (of BNR, the research and development subsidiary of
NorTel)