Toward Patterns of Exploratory Programming Practice

Patterns document best practices in many domains. For a long time, practitioners in the field of software engineering have been collecting and using such patterns too, to approach recurring design challenges. However, the challenges of efficient problem understanding and solution revising have no such form for efficiently communicating programming practice. It takes a long time to discover and learn such exploratory skills when using programming tools as is, without thorough reflection. We want to apply the idea of patterns to capture traditional and modern practices of exploratory programming. In this chapter, we begin to draft a pattern language, starting with four patterns to enable and control exploration, which we extracted from personal programming practice and experience.