Pattern Views: Concept and Tooling for Interconnected Pattern Languages

Patterns describe proven solutions for recurring problems. Typically, patterns in a particular domain are interrelated and can be organized in pattern languages. As real-world problems often require to combine patterns of multiple domains, different pattern languages have to be considered to address these problems. However, cross-domain knowledge about how patterns of different pattern languages relate to each other is mostly hidden in individual pattern descriptions or not documented at all. This makes it difficult to identify relevant patterns across pattern languages. To address this challenge, we introduce pattern views (i) to document the set of related patterns for a certain problem across pattern languages and (ii) to make this knowledge about combinable patterns available to others. To demonstrate the practical feasibility of pattern views, we integrated support for the concept into our pattern toolchain, the Pattern Atlas.