Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The Value of Pattern Analysis in IT Architecture design work.

Christopher Alexander, an architect noted for his theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects around the world. Once he said - “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.” Of course, he said this about building and towns. But this is true for any design work that includes IT. We see this quote in many IT architecture articles and books. It is true for our everyday life, in music, in creating mold, so on and so forth. In architecture design methodology the value of pattern analysis is tremendous. In designing IT Architecture from scratch or to redesign an existing system the pattern analysis can save tremendous amount of time and money. In service oriented architecture design work we often decompose business process to its coarse grain level to identify a service. When identifying and naming each business process service we are following design pattern concept. Most of the time we do not call it a pattern analysis, but we do pattern analysis. Making pattern analysis as a separate step like use case design modeling or component design modeling, etc., we can get enormous benefit. True value of creating once and use multiple times can be optimized through Pattern Analysis. It gives a structural approach to create right number of services for your architecture design work. Implementing pattern analysis while doing architecture work and how to get maximum value from this work is one of our unique capability. For detail information please contact me.