Requirements for a collaborative formulation process of evolutionary patterns

Abstract

Within distributed research projects, it is necessary to align many kinds of engineering efforts across different work packages within the considered domain. Every project member has his own visions, expectations and experience that must be considered throughout the whole project duration. This work addresses challenges encountered in distributed research projects in which the research consortia consist of partners from research and industry with multidisciplinary backgrounds. Different working practices and documentation as well as specification material is produced by every partner. We aim at giving every project member the chance to contribute knowledge in an easy and light-weight manner right from the start of the project. Our approach applies the idea of using design patterns as interdisciplinary communication medium, especially for describing and explaining the current application domain and its characteristics. This work presents considerations from two workshops with participants from two different projects that work in the domain of emergency response and enterprise & service-oriented architectures. The aim of the workshops was to analyze current pattern identification and pattern language structuring processes concerning their suitability to engineering practices within distributed research projects. Although the idea of using patterns as interdisciplinary communication medium was considered as useful, challenges that were faced with current pattern derivation processes were extracted. In a second step, the workshop participants agreed on three sets of requirements that a collaborative pattern formulation process should fulfill. The third set of requirements is especially suited to the domain of service-oriented architectures.