Hub-Spoke-and-Rim

Problem: How do you de-couple stages (architecture, design, coding) in a development process?

Context:

A design and implementation process. A well-understood domain. Aesthetic Pattern has been applied.

Forces:

Stages should be independent to reduce coupling and promote independence between stages.

Independence hampers information flow.

Independence creates opportunities for parallelism.

Solution:

Link each role to a central role that orchestrates process activities. Parallelism can be re-introduced if the central role pipelines activities.

Resulting Context:

The process has more order and is more likely to be repeatable than Aesthetic Pattern alone. The process designer must be wary of the central role becoming a bottleneck, and address such bottlenecks with other patterns (e.g., Move Responsibilities).

Design Rationale:

Empirical studies done on a front-end process called CNM for a large AT&T project (unpublished work); pipelining theory.

Next: Aesthetic Pattern