Tool support for development using patterns

There has been a growing interest in recent years in the use of abstract building blocks in system specification. Designs based on patterns and communities are two examples. However, these structures are then refined further during design and implementation, and it is often difficult to determine whether the eventual system implementation is a faithful reflection of the original properties of the pattern specified. This is particularly true of patterns used to describe an enterprise view of the system. The paper concentrates on the behavioural aspects of pattern specification, and investigates the way that observation of the system can be interpreted to check that properties of the pattern specification are preserved. It describes a diagnostic tool that checks the actual system behaviour against the pattern specification, and discusses the requirements this places on the form of the specification language and a number of the problems of interpretation that arise in applying such tools