3. Main Theme and Goals

The main theme of the workshop is to understand and to define the foundations for a first theory on why design patterns work or do not work in practice.

Thus, we invite participants with practical experience and knowledge of design patterns to gather and to report successful and less successful stories with the aim of devising a first theory on design patterns. This theory would help in proposing improvements to maintenance process, techniques, and tools, and in setting a framework for the rigourous and systematic study of program understanding. This theory would also help in predicting when and how design patterns can be used successfully and ultimately would lead to a better understanding of maintenance.

The workshop will address the following issues:

• Design patterns and software quality
• Models to model design pattern

• Design pattern maintainability
• Design pattern evolvability

• Recovery of design patterns
• Design pattern visualization

• Interoperable approaches to support design pattern recovery and documentation
• Design patterns in emerging forms of software engineering (production lines, frameworks, components…)

The goals of the workshop are:

• To define a clear terminology on the use of design patterns in development and maintenance

• To define a theory of why design patterns work or do not work

• To broaden awareness within the software engineering community of the potential issues related to design pattern adoption, evolution, and maintenance

• To facilitate the exchange of ideas and interactions among international researchers

• To define open and key research problems faced with tools/approach for design patterns

• To construct a foundation of materials for future research on design patterns