Back Room Front Room 2

Generative Pattern Language patterns by this author
(Coplien 1995).
Others would soon follow. In the following year,
Alistair Cockburn published Prioritizing Forces in
Software Design (Cockburn 1996) at the same time
that Ward Cunningham’s EPISODES pattern
language appeared (Cunningham 1996). The former
would become one of the foundations of the Agile
Alliance, and the latter would become one of the
foundations of Extreme Programming. Both of these
foundations drew from similar principles that could
be found in their counterparts of the previous year,
and that would continue to be found in their
successors. Unlike computer science design, which
was master-planned according to some method,
these techniques gave room to emergence: to design
the same way that nature grows. Whereas computer
science tried to employ formalism to omnisciently
predict outcomes, these approaches embraced
feedback. The dichotomy continues: controlling
versus responsive, revenues versus costs,
technology-centred versus people-centred.
Of course, both cost and revenues matter in real
development; formalism has its place; truly mature
processes may be repeatable and predictable.
However, in the 1980s the pendulum had swung too
far in the favour of the technological perspective.
Patterns in general, and organizational patterns in
particular, restored some balance to the objectoriented
design community. While the architectural
pattern folks wrote patterns of the structure of
software, the organizational patterns folks wrote
patterns of organizational structure. The human side
of computing and technical side of computing had
finally found a common language to express the
common structure they each had been gazing at from
their own perspective for decades.
The computer science path to design looks to
mathematics, type theory, notations and methods to
attain excellence. The human-cantered way looks to
organizational structure and to the behaviours of
people in those organizations. Great software
design, if any different from organizational design,
is too closely linked with it to be considered a
separate discipline.
5 PATTERNS
If patterns had just been a notation or a language that
allowed programmers and organizational people to
communicate, that would have been one thing. But
there is more to patterns than that, and what the
deeper foundations portend for organizational
structure and software development may be key to
ORGANIZATIONAL PATTERNS
the human component of our discipline. It is
important to explore these foundations.
5.1 Structure in Design
Design is all about solving problems by building
something, and building has a lot to do with
composition. In fact, most of our facilities for
interacting with the world around us are based on
structure and perception of structure. Human
perception itself is based on structure, symmetry,
and patterns (Alexander Huggings 1964). The core
of what humans find beautiful isn’t perfect
symmetry: the fine structures of design are slightly
asymmetric. This is no accident; there is no perfect
symmetry in nature, and understanding the
foundations of this nature of nature owes much to
modern advances in physics (Close 2000). Physicists
have a word they use to describe the configurations
that result from these “broken symmetries:”
patterns. Such deep stuff of the structure of the
Universe underlies Alexander’s design worldview:
Nature, too, creates beautiful structures which
are governed by repeated application of
structure-preserving transformations. In this
connection, I think it is useful to remark that
what I call structure-preserving transformations
are very closely related to what has become
known as “symmetry breaking” in physics.
(Alexander 2002: p. 63)
5.2 Structure of Organizations
If these ideas underlie the structure of nature, they
should underlie the structure software systems that
interact with “nature” or the cultural structures that
emerge from nature. You might object and say that
culture is too far removed from nature for patterns to
propagate to that level but, no: it’s patterns all the
way down. The classic texts on the structure of
cultures use an almost perfectly analogous notion of
pattern to describe even the architecture of human
organizations:
Patterns are those arrangements or systems of
internal relationship which give to any culture its
coherence or plan, and keep it from being a mere
accumulation of random bits. They are therefore
of primary importance. (Kroeber 1948: p. 119)
5.3 It’s All About Change
47
Evolution has had a long time to produce a perfect
human culture, but it doesn’t seem to have fared