Growing a pattern language (for security)

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners have been successfully documenting software patterns for over two decades. But the next step--building pattern languages--has proven much more difficult. This paper describes an approach for building a large pattern language for security: an approach that can be used to create pattern languages for other software domains. We describe the mechanism of growing this pattern language: how we cataloged the security patterns from books, papers and pattern collections written by all security experts over the last 15 years, how we classified the patterns to help developers find the appropriate ones, and how we identified and described the relationships between patterns in the language. To our best knowledge, this is the largest pattern language in software. But the most significant contribution of this paper is the story behind how the pattern language is grown; it illustrates the steps that can be adapted to create and grow pattern languages for other domains.