Several papers in the 2020 Pattern Languages of Programming (PLoP) conference point to emerging issues for pattern language methodology. For example, one paper examines patterns for COVID-19, drawing on some other patterns for precedent. In a similar vein, another paper suggests that pattern writers take more time to distill and share the patterns they have using new strategies and platforms, rather than flooding the literature with ever more patterns. Yet another paper considers the linguistic and epistemological assumptions of pattern writers, and calls for a deeper re-assessment. In this talk I will consider these issues, reporting on some related work with new pattern languages and wikis developed with the collaboration of other communities. I will share some concluding thoughts about the way forward into a "post-COVID world," and a world in transition through a series of crises - including deeper failures in the ways we know and act.
      Link to Video of Talk

Michael Mehaffy is a former student and long-time collaborator of Christopher Alexander, and executive director of the Sustasis Foundation in Portland, Oregon, where he collaborates with his board colleague Ward Cunningham in developing new types of pattern languages and wikis. He is also senior researcher with the Ax:son Johnson Foundation and the Centre for the Future of Places at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is also an author, educator, urban designer, planner, and strategic development consultant with an international practice. He has held teaching and/or research appointments at seven graduate institutions in six countries, and he is on the editorial boards of three international journals of urban design. He was a consultant to UN-Habitat for the Habitat III conference and its outcome document, The New Urban Agenda, and he has developed (with Ward Cunningham and others) a new pattern language and wiki to share and further develop patterns emerging form the New Urban Agenda. He received his Ph.D. in architecture at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He is known for his published research articles, professional articles and books on urban morphology, urban self-organization, architecture, computer science, and philosophy.

Domain-driven design (DDD) emphasizes the importance of creating and enforcing boundaries for sustainable software design. One of the most important concepts for accomplishing this is the bounded context, but explaining what a bounded context is has proven elusive and confusing for many.

A bounded context as a defined part of the software where particular terms, definitions and rules apply consistently enough to accomplish the goals of the software. But what does this mean more concretely? As Erics Evans has stated, "Some have gotten value, but [bounded context as a concept is]...like grabbing fog for most people." We will use connascence as a clearer way of explaining what bounded context is, why it is important, and how teams can leverage context boundaries as a powerful software design approach.

Paul Rayner is one of the world’s leading DDD and BDD practitioners. He is a programmer, coach, mentor, trainer, and popular international conference speaker. With over 25 years of hands-on software development experience in a variety of industries, Paul is a seasoned agile design coach and leadership mentor, helping teams ignite their design skills via DDD, BDD and UXD.

His company Virtual Genius LLC, provides training and coaching in collaborative design for agile teams. Paul is from Perth, Australia, but chooses to live, work and play with his wife and two children, in Denver, Colorado. He tweets with an Australian accent at @ThePaulRayner and blogs at thepaulrayner.com.

Richard Gabriel lives in Redwood City, California. He writes a poem every day.

I've wondered for a long time about the Known Uses section of a pattern and felt that just showing the use of a pattern is not enough to show QWAN or "wholeness" or efficacy without something more scientific that provides evidence that the solution really works and works better than other solutions.

Many counter-intuitive results have been shown in behavioral economics where most people would say they would behave in one way but experimentation shows they would behave differently. Good examples can be found in the "jam" and "401K" studies that show more alternatives lead to poorer decisions -- when most of us tend to believe that more alternatives would be better.

Without experimental evidence, what we do is not science. It seems that CA was always a believer in experiments, he just didn't give a lot of direction (that I can find). After NoO,he kept mentioning experiments but, again, it wasn't clear how we would incorporate that. Should there be a separate section for referencing other work or our own experiments? I can find some examples in APL but they are lightweight.

Linda Rising is an independent consultant who lives near Nashville, Tennessee. Linda has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in object-based design metrics. Her background includes university teaching as well as work in telecommunications, avionics, and tactical weapons systems. She is an internationally known presenter on topics related to agile development, patterns, retrospectives, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development. Linda is the author of numerous articles and five books. Her web site is: lindarising.org

The current pandemic has accelerated the shift to distributed work. What was previously a matter of choice or strategy has become a necessity. It is thus important to articulate and share our knowledge on how distributed teams work, the common practices and patterns that distributed teams follow.

The Workshop on Patterns for Distributed Work will take place on October 15. It is an event designed to discover patterns of distributed work and to collect stories or scenarios that illustrate their use. The outcome of the workshop will be published and made widely available to both practitioners and those who teach software engineering.

We humans practice patterning (our ability to recognize and mobilize patterns in action) and languaging (our ability to focus on language as means for consensual coordination) at many levels. We mobilize patterns and use languages in our everyday ‘operation’. We generate patterns, consciously or not, through our actions and our designs. We use language to capture these patterns when we create pattern languages. These pattern languages are said to play a role of lingua franca, i.e. of common languages among unrelated domains of practice, or to embody QWAN, the quality ‘without a name’, i.e. to convey meaning outside of any language or designation. But how well do pattern languages actually fill this role as they are infused with natural language, and a result of languaging?

The workshop will start with a short presentation of my research on the biosemiotic underpinnings of ‘patterning’ and ‘languaging’ -the paper presented at the Plop2020 conference-. We will then have a discussion on the implications of this in terms of writing and using patterns and pattern languages, and in particular on how pattern languages can help turn ‘languaging’ into ‘patterning’.

Domain modeling (such as DDD) has proven useful to help bridge the gap between domain and technical experts, specifically focused on domain modeling for designing systems.There are various lightweight techniques such as Event Storming and Context Mapping that can be useful while modeling the domain. Event storming creates a shared common understanding of the domain model with various stakeholders (non-technical process). Context Mapping is responsible for defining a boundary between bounded contexts of the subdomains. This hands-on workshop will examine and brainstorm various domain modeling techniques that have proven valuable for modeling modern software systems. We will do some pattern mining of ideas that are useful when doing the above mentioned techniques.

Open space helps people like event organizers and participants to run an egalitarian, meritocratic, and self-organizing process. Participants are pulled into creating the event, bringing their problems and their expertise to the table. Open space itself then is about the techniques that help participants form a joint agenda, negotiate and allocate time-slots, and then meet and discuss their issues until it is time to move on to the next topic and/or group.

Open Space time will be allocated at PLoP to promote the self-organization of things by attendees. Although one can't predict specific outcomes, it's usually highly productive for whatever issue people want to address. Sometimes inspiring side effects are noted and there are usually interactive fascinating dialogues. These can include games, self organized focus groups, BoFs, or almost anything. There is often a play like atmosphere with laughter and often very interesting results and engaging discussions and ideas.

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.

Tuesday Oct 13
@ 3:00 pm PDT

"A five-layer model for analyses of complex socio-technical systems"
by Tomoko Kaneko, Nobukazu Yoshioka

Tuesday Oct 13
@ 2:00 pm PDT

"Data Encoding Patterns for Quantum Computing"
by Manuela Weigold, Johanna Barzen, Frank Leymann, Marie Salm

Wednesday Oct 14
@ 2:00 pm PDT

"Teams AND Up-Front Testing for Development of Safety-Critical Systems with Agile"
by Maria H. Maqsood, Eduardo Guerra, Xiaofeng Wang, Andrea Bondavalli

Wednesday Oct 14
@ 3:00 pm PDT

"Occurrence - A Knowledge Layer Pattern"
by Nigel Davis, Chris Hartley Writing Group

Wednesday Oct 14
@ 3:00 pm PDT

"An Abstract Graph Pattern"
by Chris Hartley, Nigel David Writing Group

Wednesday Oct 14
@ 11:45 am PDT

"VideoMOOC-PL: A Pattern Language to support the development of educational videos for the MOOC context"
by Marcelo Fassbinder, Aracele G. O. Fassbinder, Ellen F. Barbosa

Wednesday Oct 14
@ 10:30 am PDT

"Guiding Students to Learn about Patterns with Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL)"
by Priya Lotlikar, Clifton Kussmaul

Wednesday Oct 14
@ 1:15 pm PDT

"Patterns in Activity Models for Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL)"
by Clifton Kussmaul

Tuesday Oct 13
@ 1:00 pm PDT

"Should we stop writing patterns?"
by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Tuesday Oct 13
@ 2:00 pm PDT

"Strangler Patterns"
by Joseph Yoder, Paulo Merson

Tuesday Oct 13
@ 3:00 pm PDT

"Software Engineering Patterns for Machine Learning Applications (SEP4MLA) - Part 2"
by Hironori Washizaki, Foutse Khomh, Yann-Gael, Gueheneuc Hironori, Takeuchi Satoshi, Okuda Naotake, Natori Naohisa Shioura

Tuesday Oct 13
@ 6:00 am PDT

"A pattern for a Secure Cloud-Based IoT Architecture"
by Eduardo B. Fernandez

Wednesday Oct 14
@ 6:00 am PDT

"Half-Proactor/Half-Async Architecture for Real Time Device Management"
by Denys Poltorak

Thursday Oct 15
@ 7:00 am PDT

"A Survey of Reference Architectures for Autonomous Cars"
by Bijayit Thapa, Eduardo Fernandez

Thursday Oct 15
@ 6:00 am PDT

"A Pattern for a Secure Sensor Node"
by Cristian Orellana, Eduardo Fernandez, Hernán Astudillo

Wednesday Oct 14
@ 10:30 am PDT

"Sequences and Scenarios for Fearless Change"
by Mary Lynn Manns, Joseph Yoder

Tuesday Oct 13
@ 11:30 am PDT

"Creating and Growing Healthy Community Open Source Projects"
by Dirk Riehle

Saturday Oct 10
@ 5:00 pm PDT
If necessary:
Saturday Oct 17
@ 5:00 pm PDT

"Patterns for Being Creative in uncertain situations"
by Kaoru Yamamoto, Satsuki Fujita, Miyako Kugue, Atsushi Hasegawa Writing Group

Monday Oct 12
@ 3:00 pm PDT

"Patterns for Learning Through Practice in a Pattern Language for Affective-Science-based Marketing"
by Takashi Iba, Miho Masai Yuuri, Abe Yuji Kosaka

Tuesday Oct 13
@ 6:00 am PDT

"Mining Drama Patterns in Dramatic Situations"
by Patrik Honíšek,Valentino Vranic ́

Wednesday Oct 14
@ 3:00 pm PDT

"Support for Living Better Throughout the COVID-19 Situation with Pattern Languages: An Attempt at Pattern Translation to Another Domain and Pattern Language Remix"
by Takashi Iba

Wednesday Oct 14
@ 12:00 PDT

"From Pattern Language to Pattern Literacy: the Biosemiotic Underpinnings of “Patterning” and “Languaging”"
by Hélène Finidori

Tuesday Oct 13
@ 12:00 PDT

"Supporting Experiential Learning through Exploring Central Topics in ICT Project Team Leadership - The rhea.framework Knowledge Base"
by David Haselberger

Monday Oct 12
@ 1:00 pm PDT

"Patterns for Distributed Teams Revisited"
by Lise Hvatum

Monday Oct 12
@ 2:00 pm PDT

"Patterns for managing remote software projects"
by Michael Weiss