A Visual Tool for Using Design Patterns as Pattern Languages

Design patterns document successful solutions to recurrent problems in a specific software development domain. However, finding the patterns one need can be difficult, often requiring the designer to comprehend a long narrative description to understand the benefits, implications and trade-offs of each pattern and of its relationships with others. In this paper, the authors propose a visual notation supported by a software tool that may help to identify patterns that could satisfy a designer's goals, as well as conveying the positive and negative relations among patterns, including dependencies and collisions among patterns selected for a specific problem.