Following up on a long-standing desire to get domain knowledge out of our heads and onto paper, a colleague and I engaged in writing our first state government pattlet. We spent about two weeks of our spare time putting together an abstract approach to case transfer based upon our varied experiences. We finally have a draft version which we feel comfortable sharing online.
As far as I know, this is a first-of-its-kind endeavor for state government. We drew heavily on Fowler’s Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models as background material for documenting the patterns. The underlying analysis, design, and approach are all original, though. Please understand that the pattlet is not perfect. We’ve marked it as a 0.1 version to reflect its state and we intend to update it over the next couple of weeks.
We would really appreciate your feedback on the pattlet. Specifically, we’re looking to understand if there are important case transfer nuances which we missed, flaws in the analysis and design, or significant domain details which might shed new light on how to approach this problem. I know that most people feel very comfortable with email but I ask you to please consider using the comments section on this page. That way, everyone can benefit from your insights.
Note that the pattlet is licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution Share-Alike” license. This license falls along the lines of common open source software licenses, allowing you to modify and re-disseminate this as you see fit, so long as you attribute the original work to us and any new work goes out under the same license as the original. We plan on distributing future pattlets under the same license. It seems to be a happy compromise between rights and reuse.
Right now, we are only giving access to the final product in PDF format but we have kicked around the idea of hosting sample code, pattern documents, and design models on a Subversion share. Let us know if this would be interesting or if we’d just be wasting our time in this endeavor. Finally, you can find the pattlet by clicking on the link below.