Architectural Patterns Revisited - A Pattern Language

TLDR

Architectural patterns provide established solutions, document design decisions, facilitate stakeholder communication, and describe quality attributes, yet their application remains ad‑hoc because of community disagreement on philosophy, granularity, and the absence of a coherent pattern language. The paper proposes a pattern language that serves as a superset of existing collections to establish common ground in the architectural patterns community. The language focuses on defining relationships between patterns and categorizing them by architectural views.

Abstract

Architectural patterns are a key concept in the field of software architecture: they offer well-established solutions to architectural problems, help to document the architectural design decisions, facilitate communication between stakeholders through a common vocabulary, and describe the quality attributes of a software system as forces. Regrettably, finding and applying the appropriate architectural patterns in practice still remains largely ad-hoc and unsystematic. This is due to the lack of consensus in the community with respect to the “philosophy” and granularity of architectural patterns, as well as the lack of a coherent pattern language. In this paper we attempt to establish common ground in the architectural patterns community by proposing a pattern language that acts as a superset of the existing architectural pattern collections and categorizations. This language is particularly focused on establishing the relationships between the patterns and performs a categorization based on the concept of “architectural views”."