Treating Pattern Sublanguages as Patterns with an Application to Organizational Patterns

Abstract

Organizing people is very important and one of the great challenges, and in particular in software development. Organizational patterns are the key to piecemeal growth of organizations. To deal with the complexity of choosing right pattern sequences and understanding pattern languages in general, we propose representing them as patterns. Such summary level patterns can be used to treat meaningful parts of pattern languages: pattern sublanguages. We applied this approach to organizational patterns. Specifically, we expressed the pattern story of establishing a new project as the New Project pattern. We also captured the dynamics of this pattern by a state diagram. As it can be observed by comparison, summary level patterns overcome patterns stories in terms of comprehensibility and consistency, with the main contribution being a direct treatment of the conflicting forces.