Features and Design Patterns - A Comparison

Abstract

Today, the worlds and terminologies of mechanical engineering and software engineering coexist, but they do not always work together seamlessly. Both worlds have developed their own separate formal vocabulary for expressing their concepts as well as for capturing and communicating their respective domain knowledge. But, these two vocabularies are not unified, interwoven, or at least interconnected in a reasonable manner. Thus, the subject of this paper is a comparison of the vocabularies of the two fields, namely feature technology from the area of mechanical engineering and software design patterns from the software engineering domain. Therefore, a certain amount of definitions, history, examples, etc. is presented for features as well as for design patterns. After this, an analysis is carried out to identify analogies and differences. The main intention of this paper is to inform both worlds - mechanical and software engineering - about the other side's terminology and to start a discussion about potential mutual benefits and possibilities to bridge the gap between these two worlds, e.g. to improve the manageability of CAx product development processes