Software patterns to improve knowledge transfer: an experiment.

Abstract

Patterns for software development have been a hot topic for some time within the object-oriented community. Patterns are part of a software engineering problem-solving discipline. It all started with Design Patterns [11], but gradually patterns were used in a larger number of areas of system development. The goal of patterns within the software community is to create a body of literature to help software developers resolve recurring problems encountered throughout all areas of software development. Patterns help to create a shared language for communicating insight and experience about these problems and their solutions [4]. In this research report, first, a definition of software patterns is given, including some history, an overview of the different kinds of software patterns, the elements of a pattern and the different pattern formats. Secondly, as patterns claim to improve transfer of knowledge, we performed an experiment to test this hypothesis. This experiment is described in Section 2. Finally, Section 3 formulates the conclusions about this experiment.