Some software organizations serve their customers well, they deliver on time, deliver a profit to the stockholders and build a supporting workplace for the team. And some don't. Quality of the result of our efforts depends on the quality of communication between users, customers and developers, designers.

Many people believe that the processes of OO software development are fundamentally different from those used in developing software in other paradigms. We will explore how some organizational and process patterns apply - or don't apply in OO development. Our findings may validate or repudiate the above belief.

Patterns help us understand existing organizations. Patterns have everything to do with transferring knowledge. They are often associated with reuse. They provide transfer of concept, insights, and information. Although there is nothing intrinsically object-oriented about process patterns, families of patterns that help shape the day to day life of our software projects have been collected within the OO-community. Our software projects don't span generations. So we need short cuts, getting teams together that are able of learning and sharing a common language in a short time.

A good pattern language for organization should give us both the means of expression and the freedom to tailor the solution to the particular environment and context of application of the patterns.

Goal of the workshop:

• We will explore how some organizational and process patterns apply - or don't apply in OO development.
• In a highly interactive workshop we diverge and converge on what a core organization and process pattern language could and should be.
• We test our findings, using scenarios from real life situations.
• We suggest that a poster be presented later during the conference.

Workshop participants: OO-project managers and technical leads. Both pattern writers and users of process patterns (beginners and experienced).

Organizers:

Martine Devos, EDS Electronic Data Systems
Email: martine.devos@eds.com

Michael Beedle, Framework Technologies Inc.

Stephen Berczuk, NetSuite Development Corporation

Neil Harrison, Lucent Technologies