A framework for evaluating software design pattern specification languages

Software design patterns are solutions to recurring problems. These solutions have been widely accepted and adopted by the software practitioners. Design Patterns were initially described informally through the use of textual descriptions or some object oriented graphical notations. However, informal descriptions of design patterns give rise to ambiguity and incorrect usage of the design pattern. Many design pattern specification languages have been proposed to address the shortcomings of informal descriptions. These design pattern formalization techniques have been developed for different intentions including verification of design patterns and detection of design patterns in source code. In this paper we provide a set of evaluation criteria to evaluate and compare the various design pattern specification languages in order to aid practitioners and researchers to select the appropriate language for their use.