Work in progress: Transitioning from novice to expert software engineers through design patterns: Is it really working?

Since their wide adoption by the software engineering community in the mid-90's, design patterns have become an important educational component in the training of novice software engineers due to the common belief that, as distilled experience of seasoned software designers, they can transform novice software engineers into skilled professionals in a relatively short time frame. This paper questions the validity of this commonly-held belief about the educational value of conventional patterns, arguing that although there is tremendous value in capturing and disseminating software engineering experience in the form of patterns, conventional design patterns cannot deliver on this expectation to significantly shorten the experience growth curve. We report initial results from an ongoing research project that aims to not only identify the difficulties in using conventional patterns as educational means for novices, but also to use such insights to develop new forms of patterns to help educators and experts to more effectively communicate and transfer their software engineering knowledge, experience, and understanding of best practices to novices.