This work draws on data gathered as part of the Pasteur process research program at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In the Pasteur program, we studied software development organizations in many companies worldwide, covering a wide spectrum of development cultures. The Pasteur analysis techniques are based in part on organizational visualization. Many of the patterns in this pattern language have visual analogues in the Pasteur analyses. I sometimes use visualizations to illustrate a pattern.
There are two kinds of pictures used in the Pasteur studies. The first is a social network diagram, also called an adjacency diagram. Each diagram is a network of roles and the communication paths between them. The roles are placed according to their coupling relationships: closely coupling roles are close together, and de-coupled roles are far apart. Roles at the center of these pictures tend to be the most active roles in these organizations, while those nearer the edges have a more distant relationship with the organization as a whole.
The second kind of picture is an interaction grid. The axes of the interaction grid span the roles in the organization, ordered according to their coupling to the organization as a whole. If a role at ordinate position p initiates an interaction with a role at coordinate position q, we put a point at the position (p,q). The point is shaded according to the strength of the interaction.
The pattern texts, and particularly the design rationales, often make reference to documents or projects that typify the pattern. "QPW" refers to Borland's QuattroPro for Windows development, and on process research conducted there by AT&T Bell Labs in 1993. The research is further discussed in the proceedings of BIC/94 [Coplien], in a column by Richard Gabriel [Gabriel], and in an article in Dr. Dobb's Journal [Coplien].
The notation "ATT1" refers to a high productivity project inside AT&T, characterized by concurrent engineering in a small team environment. Findings from research on that project have not yet been published.
The analyses occasionally make reference to the work of Thomas Allen, whose relevant perspectives can be found in his book on technology information flow. [Allen].
I often draw from a whimsical book on architecture called The Most Beautiful House in the World, by Witold Rybczynski [Rybczynski].
Cites to Alexander refer to A Pattern Language [Alexander], and use paragraph designations (¤) to refer to pattern numbers therein.
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