PROGRAM

Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoPTM) conference is a premier event for pattern authors and pattern enthusiasts to gather, discuss and learn more about patterns and software development.

The conference program is being completed, and this page will be updated as more details are known.

Conference at a Glance

The BootCamp, a special full-day Pre-PLoP activity for newcomers, will happen during Friday, October 23rd 8h30–18h00. The PLoP conference starts on Friday evening, October 23rd 18h00, with the traditional games and pizza dinner and it will conclude on Monday evening, October 26th at 18h00.

PLoP will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, at the Sheraton Station Square Hotel. The Bootcamp will be held in a different venue close by, which will be announced soon.

Keynotes

"Keeping A Pattern Language Alive"

@ Fountain View Room

Mary Lynn Manns, Saturday, 24 Oct, 11:00-12:00

Christopher Alexander tells us, “Patterns must not be etched in stone; rather, they must grow as the users gain new experiences.” As co-author of the Fearless Change pattern language, Mary Lynn has steadily worked on this language with Linda Rising for almost 20 years. She will share her insights on keeping a pattern language alive and updated with changes to existing patterns and additions of new patterns. To do this, she will use the patterns in Fearless Change to explain how other authors can use these tools to keep their patterns growing and evolving, rather than being “etched in stone”.

Mary Lynn Manns, PhD is a professor of Management Information Systems at the University of North Carolina in beautiful Asheville, NC. She has taught students from freshman through graduate level how to “change the world” and was recently awarded Distinguished Professor of Social Relations for her work in change leadership. Her books, co-authored with Linda Rising, are Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas (2005) and More Fearless Change: Strategies for Making Your Ideas Happen (2015). Mary Lynn has given numerous presentations throughout the world in organizations that include Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, and amazon.com. But one of her favorites was a 2013 university commencement address in which she brought graduates to their feet to take the first steps towards changing the world by doing a little Zumba dancing.

"Progress Toward an Engineering Discipline of Software"

@ Fountain View Room

Mary Shaw, Monday, 26 Oct, 10:30-12:00

Is “software engineering” really engineering yet? The term was coined in 1968 to call attention to problems with software production. Both theory and practice for software have evolved since then, but do we by now have a true engineering discipline? Classical engineering disciplines have emerged from craft practice and commercialization through the infusion of codified knowledge and science. Using this emergence pattern as a point of reference, I will sketch the evolution of software engineering, drawing on civil engineering and software architecture for examples that show the progressive codification of informal knowledge toward rigorous models and tools. This will provide the basis for assessing the maturity of the field and identifying our next challenges.

Mary Shaw is the Alan J. Perlis University Professor of Computer Science in the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests lie in the area of software engineering, particularly software architecture and design of systems used by real people. She has received the United States’ National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (with David Garlan), the IEEE Computer Society TCSE's Distinguished Educator Award, and CSEE&T's Nancy Mead Award for Excellence in Software Engineering Education. She is a fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, and the AAAS.

Focus Groups & Workshops

"Fearless Change Journey"

Mary Lynn Manns, Saturday, 24 Oct, 16:00-17:30 (FG1)

This is your time to use the Fearless Change patterns to plan how you would like to make the world a better place. You can even use these patterns to improve yourself too. Bring your challenges and frustrations and those goals you haven’t yet found a way to start. You’ll get the opportunity to “play” with the patterns to begin your journey in becoming a leader of change!

Mary Lynn Manns, PhD is a professor of Management Information Systems at the University of North Carolina in beautiful Asheville, NC. She has taught students from freshman through graduate level how to “change the world” and was recently awarded Distinguished Professor of Social Relations for her work in change leadership. Her books, co-authored with Linda Rising, are Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas (2005) and More Fearless Change: Strategies for Making Your Ideas Happen (2015). Mary Lynn has given numerous presentations throughout the world in organizations that include Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, and amazon.com. But one of her favorites was a 2013 university commencement address in which she brought graduates to their feet to take the first steps towards changing the world by doing a little Zumba dancing.

"Generative Processes of Community with the Fundamental Properties"

Takashi Iba, Joe Yoder, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Saturday, 24 Oct, 16:00-17:30 (FG1)

The work of Christopher Alexander influenced the classic Design Patterns book as well as the software patterns community and a half a dozen or so conferences a year, PLoPs. Alexander is an architect interested in understanding the nature of beauty and its objective reality, which led to the publication of his gargantuan four-book essay, The Nature of Order. In it he attempts nothing short of proposing a new scientific method and cosmology to replace the Cartesian / reductionist / mechanistic approach to science; and while he’s at it, he proposes a common sense way to understand the incomprehensible mathematics of quantum mechanics (along the way he also unifies science, art, and the spiritual).

The Nature of Order focuses on centers, life, and wholeness, the fundamental process, and structure-preserving transformations. Core to this is an evolutionary process that proposes that complex systems do not spring into existence completely formed, rather they evolve through a lot of small steps. He discusses a series of 10 structure-enhancing actions that he claims will always intensify the life and wholeness of a thing. Recently, Iba laboratory proposed other type of fundamental properties for human actions: 24 fundamental behavioral properties.

This workshop will examine these evolutionary generative processes and how they can be related to other areas such as building and sustaining community. This workshop - not the workshop itself but the ideas in it - will leave you confused, profoundly smarter, reeling, in despair, and suffused by joy about what is possible for us.

Takashi Iba is an associate professor at the Faculty of Policy Management and the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University, Japan. He received a Ph.D. in Media and Governance from Keio University in 2003. With collaborating with his students, Dr. Iba created many pattern languages concerning human actions. He authored Learning Patterns (2014), Presentation Patterns (2014), Collaboration Patterns (2014), Survival Language (2015), Words for a Journey (2015) and many academic books in Japanese such as the bestselling Introduction to Complex Systems (1998).

Joseph W. Yoder is a founder and principal of The Refactory, Inc., a company focused on software architecture, design, implementation, consulting and mentoring on all facets of software development. Joseph is an international speaker and pattern author, long standing member of the ACM, and the President of The Hillside Group, a group dedicated to improving the quality of software development. Joseph specializes in Architecture, Analysis and Design, C#, Java, Smalltalk, Patterns, Agile Methods, Adaptable Systems, Refactoring and Frameworks. Joe is the author of many patterns, including being an author of the Big Ball of Mud pattern, which illuminates many fallacies in the approach to software architecture.Joe currently resides in Urbana, Illinois. He teaches Agile Methods, Design Patterns, Object Design, Refactoring, and Testing in industrial settings and mentors many developers on these concepts. Joe thinks software is still too hard to change. He wants do something about this and believes that with good patterns and by putting the ability to change software into the hands of the people with the knowledge to change it seems to be on promising avenue to solve this problem.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock invented Responsibility-Driven Design and by accident started the x-Driven Design meme (TDD, DDD, BDD…). She authored two popular object design books that are still in print. Rebecca helps teams hone their design, architecture and thinking skills and reduce technical debt. Rebecca is program director of the Agile Alliance’s Experience Reports Program. She serves on the IEEE Software advisory board and on The Hillside Group board. She co-founded Agile Open Northwest and served on the Agile Alliance board and as IEEE Software’s Design Columnist. She writes patterns about sustainable architecture, software quality and blogs at The Responsible Designer.

"Pattern Language of Layering Focus Group"

Wiebe Wiersema, Christian Köppe, Saturday, 24 Oct, 16:00-17:30 (FG1)

Layering is hard. Patterns around layering have been created (e.g. shearing layers and layer pattern itself) and many books describe layering. But there is a lack of a pattern language in this field that can help architects to design a better layering. In our paper “Logical Layering Heuristic” (submitted to PLoP’15) we propose a method that provides a structured approach for coming to a good layering. However, behind this method (or high-level pattern) there certainly are hiding some patterns that, we believe, are the reasons for why the method is useful. The goal of this focus group is to identify both already described patterns and possible pattern candidates in the method (and in the good application of layering itself) as a first step towards a pattern language for layering. The focus hereby is holistic, we're interested in ALL possibly relevant aspects of layering, incl. architectural/design patterns, organizational patterns, collaboration patterns, requirements patterns etc., and their relations.

Goals include, but are not limited to... a) Discover existing patterns that can be used in this pattern language; b) Pinpoint candidate patterns that can be expanded upon in new patterns descriptions.

Main discussion topics: a) What existing patterns can be included in the pattern language? b) What are new patterns that should be part of this language?

Participants should have experience with the application of layering in software architectures. It also would be good if they have read the paper “Logical Layering Heuristic”. A link to the article will be provided before the conference.

Wiebe Wiersema is professor by appointment on Digital Architecture at the HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, the Netherlands. His interest lie in software architecture, successful project delivery and software development factories.

Christian Köppe is Senior Lecturer Software Engineering at the HAN University of Applied Sciences Arnhem, the Netherlands. He gives lectures in different disciplines like Software Architecture, Patterns and Frameworks, Model Driven Development, Databases and others. He is member of the board of the Hillside group, an active member of Hillside Europe, and also member of the program committee of different conferences .

"Developing an Open, Collaborative Design Pattern Repository"

Paul Salvador Inventado, Peter Scupelli, Sunday, 25 Oct, 16:00-17:30 (FG2)

Pattern authors often struggle to find relevant design patterns across many sources ranging from books, papers, conferences, journals, and online repositories. Many attempts to build a central consolidated design pattern repository failed. Some possible explanations include: (a) pattern authors disagree on pattern formats to support; (b) a central repository raises thorny questions about design pattern ownership and attribution; (c) such a large and ambitious repository requires broad community support. In this workshop, an open, collaborative pattern repository is discussed as a possible solution to address previous challenges. We seek to understand the challenges and opportunities from a PLoP point of view.

The workshop is intended for design pattern authors and users. Its main goal is to introduce the open, collaborative design pattern repository and will involve a short presentation of the facilitators' work, followed by an interactive discussion with the participants. Feedback from the participants can help to further refine the repository’s framework and identify different strategies that can encourage stakeholders to contribute and collaborate in building the repository.

Paul Salvador Inventado is a post-doctoral researcher in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include educational data mining, learning analytics, and data-driven approaches for the production, use, and validation of design patterns. He was a faculty member in the Software Technology Department at De La Salle University, Philippines for 5 years. After which, he attained his PhD in Information Science from Osaka University, Japan through the Monbukagakusho Scholarship before filling his current position.

Peter Scupelli is Assistant Professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. His teaching and research focus on shaping human behavior through design. He researches how human behavior, information technology, and the physical environment, support studio learning, coordination in high-reliability organizations, and sustainable behavior choices. Peter’s training and career path link architecture, interaction design, and human-computer interaction research. He holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, M.Des. in Interaction Design, and an undergraduate Architecture degree.

"Improving Writer’s Workshop by Introducing Checklists and Perspectives"

Tian Xia, Joseph Yoder, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Hironori Washizaki, Sunday, 25 Oct, 16:00-17:30 (FG2)

Writer’s Workshop (WW) is a method to review, evaluate and improve each other’s pattern, which is widely accepted in xPLoP conference including this EuroPLoP. However, there are several problem existing in traditional WW such as “poor experience of moderator”, “poor knowledge of participants” or “poor pattern accepted”. Detail discussion of these problem could be found in our work. As a solution to these “ad hoc” reviewing, we suggest utilizing some software reading techniques such as Checklist-Based Reading (CBR) or Perspective-Based Reading (PBR) into WW. In this focus group, we are going to discuss it together by conducting a mini WW.

Key Idea: We have conducted experiments in this topic several times before. Based on those result, we will hold this focus group in the idea of “Customized checklist” and “Using checklist as a remainder”. Thus to say, participants will receive checklists made for reviewing target paper, and keep the contents in mind during reading and discussion, as a remainder. Detail process could be found in this paper.

Target participants: We prefer to have newer author join us, as we believe that our approach will have much effect on them. Of course, experts are also welcomed. We are willing to listen to your opinion on this approach and discuss together.

Tian Xia is a master student of Computer Science and Engineering in Waseda University. He is also belongs to Global Software Engineering Laboratory, Waseda University, Japan. He joined the research of pattern WW and review technique from the 4th year in undergraduate school.

Joseph W. Yoder is a founder and principal of The Refactory, Inc., a company focused on software architecture, design, implementation, consulting and mentoring on all facets of software development. Joseph is an international speaker and pattern author, long standing member of the ACM, and the President of The Hillside Group, a group dedicated to improving the quality of software development. Joseph specializes in Architecture, Analysis and Design, C#, Java, Smalltalk, Patterns, Agile Methods, Adaptable Systems, Refactoring and Frameworks. Joe is the author of many patterns, including being an author of the Big Ball of Mud pattern, which illuminates many fallacies in the approach to software architecture.Joe currently resides in Urbana, Illinois. He teaches Agile Methods, Design Patterns, Object Design, Refactoring, and Testing in industrial settings and mentors many developers on these concepts. Joe thinks software is still too hard to change. He wants do something about this and believes that with good patterns and by putting the ability to change software into the hands of the people with the knowledge to change it seems to be on promising avenue to solve this problem. On a personal side, Joe is also an avid amateur photographer, motorcycle enthusiast, and enjoys samba dancing!!!

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock invented Responsibility-Driven Design and by accident started the x-Driven Design meme (TDD, DDD, BDD…). She authored two popular object design books that are still in print. Rebecca helps teams hone their design, architecture and thinking skills and reduce technical debt. Rebecca is program director of the Agile Alliance’s Experience Reports Program. She serves on the IEEE Software advisory board and on The Hillside Group board. She co-founded Agile Open Northwest and served on the Agile Alliance board and as IEEE Software’s Design Columnist. She writes patterns about sustainable architecture, software quality and blogs at The Responsible Designer.

Hironori Washizaki is head and associate professor at Global Software Engineering Laboratory, Waseda University, Japan. He also works at National Institute of Informatics as visiting associate professor. He has long-term experience of practicing and researching software patterns and pattern languages. Thus, he and other experts are leading pattern communities mostly in Japan and Asia region, such as launching and chairing AsianPLoPs since 2010. He has served at various professional societies such as IEEE Computer Society Japan Chair, SEMAT Japan Chapter Chair, IPSJ SamurAI Coding Director, and ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC7/WG20 Convenor.

"Software Engineering Research Patterns Mining Focus Group"

Mary Shaw, Monday, 26 Oct, 13:30-15:30 (FG3)

Software engineering research follows a variety of paradigms, including empirical studies, formal analysis, system building, systematic literature review, and qualitative studies. Unfortunately, the field has generally not been very explicit about how research in these styles should be reported, especially about the differences between reports of research in different styles. The problem lies not just in the surface qualities of the papers, but in the deep structure -- the scientific arguments.

Careful reading of good papers reveals considerable regularity. This calls out for a pattern language that captures the recurring elements: identifying the settings where they are appropriate, the ground rules for carrying them out, and suitable ways to use them in combination.

The bare bones of such a Pattern Language for Software Engineering Research Papers are under development at SEresearchpatterns.org. There are patterns that capture the structure of the scientific argument and the way it maps to the overall structure of the paper. There are patterns for elements within papers (e.g., traceability from claim to result, related work) that are used in numerous types of papers. To get started, it focuses on 8-10 page conference papers.

The goal of this focus group is to put some meat on those bare bones. That means identifying patterns for more paradigms, recognizing commonalities and differences, and refining the levels of granularity in the language. We will try to capture the essence of the resulting patterns but probably will not have time to write them in detail.

It would be very helpful if participants would choose three or four papers in their preferred research style and sketch the patterns that they find in the style of SEresearchpatterns.org.

Mary Shaw is the Alan J. Perlis University Professor of Computer Science in the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests lie in the area of software engineering, particularly software architecture and design of systems used by real people. She has received the United States’ National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (with David Garlan), the IEEE Computer Society TCSE's Distinguished Educator Award, and CSEE&T's Nancy Mead Award for Excellence in Software Engineering Education. She is a fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, and the AAAS.

"Focus Group on Security (and Related) Patterns"

Eduardo B. Fernandez, Monday, 26 Oct, 13:30-15:30 (FG3)

A recent paper did an experiment to show that security patterns are not very useful. However, they did not consider methodologies, only patterns in isolation.

This group will intend to discuss the following questions relevant to the use of security patterns:

  1. Do we have good methodologies to build secure systems using patterns? If so, why are they not used?
  2. Can we merge or combine some of them to have a complete (with tools) and tested methodology?
  3. Can we have a unified catalog? At least, unified pattern descriptions. We started to work in this direction in EuroPLoP.

I think there is plenty to talk about these topics but I will accept suggestions for other relevant questions. The idea is for researchers on security patterns to exchange ideas and start possible collaborations.

Eduardo B. Fernandez (Eduardo Fernandez-Buglioni) is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He has published numerous papers on authorization models, object-oriented analysis and design, and security patterns. He has written four books on these subjects, the most recent being a book on security patterns. He has lectured all over the world at both academic and industrial meetings. He has created and taught several graduate and undergraduate courses and industrial tutorials. His current interests include security patterns, web services and cloud computing security and fault tolerance. He holds a MS degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Member of ACM. He is an active consultant for industry, including assignments with IBM, Allied Signal, Motorola, Lucent, and others. More details can be found at www.cse.fau.edu/~ed.

Games

Games

The PLoP Games Master is Christian Kohls (see schedule)

Christian Kohls, PhD, and a professor for computer science and socio-technical systems at Germany’s largest university of applied sciences, the TH Köln. Patterns are a big part of his life – including software patterns, educational patterns, and patterns for creative thinking. Being a regular PLoP participant he never misses a game session – for the fun, inspiration and community building.

Accepted Papers

All accepted papers were organized into Writer's Workshops by categorizing the contents and trying to build groups with a balanced workload (number of papers) and with matching contents. The conference versions will be available during the next few days and the final versions will be available after the conference.

Writers' Workshops

Steelers Group, led by Richard Gabriel

"Pattern Illustrating Patterns A Pattern Language for Pattern Illustrating"
by Natsumi Miyazaki, Rika Sakuraba, Kaori Harasawa, Takashi Iba

"Two-level Checklists and Perspectives: Software Reading Techniques for Pattern Writer’s Workshop"
by Tian Xia, Hironori Washizaki, Yoshiaki Fukazawa, Joseph Yoder, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

"The Mystery Case of Undiscovered Patterns"
by David West, Jane Quillien

"Fundamental Behavioral Properties – Part 2: Extending the Theory of Centers for Pattern Language 3.0"
by Yuji Harashima, Tomoki Kaneko, Taichi Isaku, Takashi Iba

"Guiding Patterns of Natural Design: Mining Living Quality"
by Jessie Henshaw

"What's the PREMES behind your Pattern?"
by Jan de Muijnck-Hughes, Ishbel M.M. Duncan

"Agile Design Process with Patterns for Campus Building: The Keio-SFC Experiment"
by Takashi Iba, Norihiko Kimura, Takuya Honda, Sumire Nakamura, Sakurako Kogure, Ayaka Yoshikawa

Riverhounds Group, led by Michael John

"Relating Patterns and Reference Architectures"
by Eduardo Guerra, Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

"Patterns to Develop and Evolve an Agile Architecture During a Software Project"
by Eduardo Guerra, Brazil, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Joseph Yoder

"Logical Layering Heuristic Pattern"
by Wiebe Wiersema, Leo Pruijt

"QA to AQ Part Four - Shifting from Quality Assurance to Agile Quality: “Prioritizing Qualities and Making them Visible”"
by Joseph W. Yoder, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Hironori Washizaki

"Dynamic Generated Adapters from Adaptive Object Models to Static APIs"
by Eduardo Martins Guerra, Jean Novaes Santos, Ademar Aguiar, Luiz Gustavo Diniz

Pirates Group, led by Hironori Washizaki

"The Software Container pattern"
by Madiha H. Syed, Eduardo B. Fernandez

"DevOps patterns for software orchestration on public and private clouds"
by Tiago Sousa, Filipe Figueiredo Correia, Hugo Sereno Ferreira

"Towards a Catalog of Performance Smells for Parallel Computing"
by Bharatkumar Sharma, Girish Suryanarayana

"A threat pattern for the “Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)” attack"
by Rohini Sulatycki, Eduardo B. Fernandez

"Systematic Mapping of Security Patterns Research"
by Yurina Ito, Hironori Washizaki, Masatoshi Yoshizawa, Yoshiaki Fukazawa, Takao Okubo, Haruhiko Kaiya, Atsuo Hazeyama, Nobukazu Yoshioka, Eduardo B. Fernandez

Penguins Group, led by Christian Kohls

"The Extended Money Object Pattern"
by Russ Rubis, Ionut Cardei

"The Business Data Object Versioning and Change History Patterns"
by Russ Rubis, Ionut Cardei

"Patterns for Software Startups"
by Jorge Melegati, Alfredo Goldman

"The Magic 5 of Innovation"
by Christian Kohls

"Theme-Centered Interaction. Ruth C. Cohn's pattern language for facilitating groups"
by Philipp Bachmann

"Startup Patterns - Strategies to building high-tech companies from scratch"
by Daniel Cukier, Fabio Kon

Panthers Group, led by Mary Lynn Manns

"Lecture Design Patterns: More Interactivity Improvement Patterns"
by Christian Köppe, Michel Portier, René Bakker, Stijn Hoppenbrouwers

"Assessment-Driven Course Design - Fair Play Patterns"
by Joe Bergin, Christian Kohls, Christian Köppe, Yishay Mor, Michel Portier, Till Schümmer, Steven Warburton

"A Data-driven Methodology for Producing Online Learning System Design Patterns"
by Paul Salvador Inventado, Peter Scupelli

"Patterns for a Company to Collaborate with Local Community on Social Issues"
by Miyuki Mizutani, Masamichi Takahashi

"Patterns of Peeragogy"
by Joseph Corneli, Charles Jeffrey Danoff, Charlotte Pierce, Paola Ricaurte, Lisa Snow MacDonald

"Flipped Classroom Patterns - Using Student Solutions"
by Christian Köppe, Ralph Niels, Robert Holwerda, Lars Tijsma, Niek van Diepen, Koen van Turnhout, René Bakker