Growing Organizations with Patterns: Lessons from Drama

Organizational patterns of software development have been mined in highly successful software organizations. Yet, no case of their application in a production setting has been reported. Our fear is that this is so because practitioners are expected to apply organizational patterns out of their descriptions. Organizational patterns of software development inspired explicitly stating and documenting drama patterns. We think that drama patterns have something to give back: interactivity and involvement exhibited by the process of building drama plays with drama patterns can be introduced into applying organizational patterns of software development. The key to this is that organizing people in software development is like creating a drama play. As in drama plays, the members of software development organizations take different roles and go through a number of situations in which they communicate and collaborate with each other. Although their drama plays will never be performed in front of the audience, these drama plays are going to determine the software systems they build. Coming out of two particular cases of pattern application related to people, one of which is about a software development organization built out of patterns with the applier not being aware of the notion of an organizational pattern, and the other about drama play built by intentionally applying drama patterns, some lessons have been drawn on how to apply organizational patterns of software development.