Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 3, numbers 1 and 2, 2010 // View article

A Quality Criteria Framework for Pattern Validation

Authors:
Daniela Wurhofer
Marianna Obrist
Elke Beck
Manfred Tscheligi

Keywords: patterns; validation; quality framework; validation methods; case study.

Abstract:
Patterns represent an important tool for communicating, documenting, and looking up best practices for both novice and expert system developers and designers. Working in the field of patterns not only requires a well-structured approach to develop new patterns but also a guidance to validate patterns in order to ensure a high quality. Although there are a number of different patterns and pattern languages available, it is still unclear how to validate patterns in a structured way. Within this paper, we aim to fill this gap by introducing a Quality Criteria Framework developed on the basis of existing pattern research. Particularly, five main quality criteria for patterns will be presented and discussed in detail. The idea of our framework is to provide structured guidance for validating patterns in a comprehensive way by using quality criteria. In order to show the applicability of the quality criteria framework in practice, a case study using selected criteria from the framework for validating an existing pattern collection was conducted. This case study showed the appropriateness of our framework for validating patterns and iterating them on the basis of the validation results.

Pages: 252 to 264

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2010. Used with permission.

Publication date: September 5, 2010

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628