A Pattern Language for Tool Construction and Integration Based on the Tools and Materials Metaphor

Why do people prefer to use certain software systems and why do they have problems using others? What is the quality within certain software that makes people soon feel familiar using it and lets them work efficiently? These are questions that we, like a lot of people who develop and use application systems in their everyday work, asked ourselves. We believe that the key to this quality (in the sense of [Pir74]) is found in systems that allow people to work according to their qualification and needs while using their skills and competence. In order to develop software with this quality we, as a group, have put together many of the things which have proved useful in software engineering over the last decades and have integrated these methods and techniques into a unifying approach – the Tools and Materials Metaphor [BCS92, BZ92]. It has guided us and other developers during analysis and design and has helped to envision and finally build systems of quality. The Tools and Materials Metaphor is an approach with a specific underlying view of human work: