A visual tool for using design patterns as pattern languages
Paloma Dı́az, Ignacio Aedo, Mary Beth Rosson, John M. Carroll · 2010
Design patterns document successful solutions to recurrent problems in a specific software development domain. However, finding the patterns you need can be difficult, often requiring the designer to comprehend a long narrative description to understand the benefits, implications and trade-offs of each pattern and of its relationships with others. In this paper we propose a visual notation supported by a software tool that may help to identify patterns that could satisfy a designer’s goals, as well as conveying the positive and negative relations among patterns, including dependencies and collisions among patterns selected for a specific problem. This work extends the concept of Softgoal Interdependency Graphs (SIG) enhancing them with a number of visual clues and interaction capabilities to help designers realize the contributions and trade-offs of their design ideas and the complexity of the solution space they are building up.