Towards Ontology-Driven Heuristic Assessment Generation for Software Design Patterns

While software design patterns have been proposed for a wide variety of software domains, surprisingly little has been done to formalize an online assessment methodology. In other words, how does one assess a software engineerpsilas learning of a particular design pattern? This paper presents a framework and a tool motivated by Bloompsilas Taxonomy that extends an existing OWL ontology for design patterns in combination with assessment-generation heuristics to generate online assessments for software engineers. The resulting assessments are expressed in XML using the IMS-QTI standard. The paper also presents example assessments for GOF design patterns.