Abstract

We need ways to describe designs that communicate the reasons for our design decisions, not just the results. Design patterns have been proposed as ways of communicating design information. This paper shows that patterns can be used to derive an architecture from its problem statement. The resulting description makes it easier to understand the purpose of the various architectural features. Introduction Design is hard. One way to avoid the act of design is to reuse existing designs. But reusing designs requires learning them, or at least some parts of them, and communicating complex designs is hard, too. One reason for this is that existing design notations focus on communicating the "what" of designs, but almost completely ignore the "why". However, the "why" of a design is crucial for customizing it to a particular problem. We need ways of describing designs that communicate the reasons for our design decisions, not just the results. One approach to improving design, currently receiv...

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