Facilitating Pattern Repository Access with the Implicit Culture Framework

Software patterns enable an efficient transfer of design experience by documenting common solutions to recurring design problems. However, given the steadily growing number of patterns in the literature and online repositories, it can be hard for non-experts to select patterns appropriate to their needs, or even to be aware of the existing patterns. We describe an implicit culture approach for supporting developers in choosing patterns suitable for a given problem. It consists in providing developers with recommendations based on the history of decisions made by other developers regarding which patterns to use in related problems. The proposed architecture comprises observers that collect information about developer actions, an inductive module to develop a theory about actions performed in different situations, and a composer that suggests actions based on the theory.