For tools to be aware of patterns, the patterns must be formalized, at least partially. At this point I must quote Gregor Hohpe to clarify my thoughts, as I strongly agree with his skipticism:
Typically, when people ask me about “codifying” or “toolifying” patterns my first reaction is one of skepticism. Patterns are meant to be a human-to-human communication mechanism, not a human-to-machine mechanism. After all, I have pointed many people to the fact that a pattern is not just the piece of code in the example section. It’s the context-problem-forces-solution combination that makes patterns so useful.
Patterns link together a problem part to a solution part. This is expressed within the limits a stated context outside of which it is no more applicable. Patterns also emphasize the forces involved, that you must consider to decide how and whether or not to apply the pattern.
Patterns litterature usually describes examples of application of patterns. In your project, you will have to do more work to adapt the pattern solution to your exact need. A pattern solution may be stretched a lot, but the pattern remains as long as humans still recognize its presence. Every different way of applying a pattern is called a pattern variant.
Addressing the variant problem
Formal descriptions of anything human is too restrictive, and this is especially true for patterns which are the product of human analysis, in that they resist simple formalization. However if we focus on sub-parts of patterns, it becomes easier to formalize them, at least for their solution part.
For example a design pattern that uses (in its solution part) some form of inheritance admits several variants. At first, the pattern solution seems to resist against its formalization. However if we now focus on the inheritance part only, we can enumerate every possible alternative for it. For example we can use:
- interface and classes that implement it
- abstract class and classes that extend it
- concrete class provided it is not final (assume we’re in Java), so that it can be extended
Notice that each alternative is a solution to the same problem “How to realize some

form of inheritance”. We can say that each alternative is indeed a pattern, and by the way Mark Grand already described them in Patterns in Java Volume 1. These patterns are easy to formalize, as they can be precisely described in terms of programming language elements.
How can we split a pattern into parts? The idea is to identify the areas that are fragile with respect to the variant problem in the solution part of a pattern, and to consider them as lower-level problems embedded inside the bigger pattern.
In the example before, the problem was to achieve “some form of inheritance”, and we listed three patterns that address this problem.
Provided it can be split into sub-parts (hence into smaller problems), any pattern solution can be formalized by recursively formalizing its sub-parts. If a sub-part cannot be easily made formal, then it can be split again into sub-parts, and so on until each sub-part can.
Given a pattern solution that we want to formalize:
- If it can be described formally directly, then we are done (terminal)
- If it cannot be fully described formally, then extract the problematic sub-parts into sub-problems, then find every pattern that addresses each sub-problem, and formalize their solution part
We can then represent a pattern as a tree of smaller patterns, where the solution part of each patter is connected to the problem part of another pattern.
From pattern language to pattern grammar

When the pattern is applied into the code, at each node in the tree there is actually a selection of which variant of the sub pattern to use. As such, each selected pattern represents an atom of decision in the design process.
It then appears that we have a form of grammar for patterns, where there are terminal patterns solutions T (easier to formalize in term of programming language elements), non-terminal parts of patterns solutions N (that cannot be easily formalized but that can formally ask for help to solve their sub-problems), and where the production rules P are nothing but the patterns themselves:
Patterns are production rules that link: elements of N (the problems) to elements of (N Union T)
Conclusion
I have suggested quickly a way to formalize patterns solutions in spite of their fragility with respect to their variants. This approach identifies patterns as production rules in some grammar over the set of patterns considered.
This perspective is well-suited for tools to work on patterns in real-world projects, where the patterns are indeed applied in many variant forms. The problem of this approach is that every known pattern that is variant-fragile must be reconsidered and have its solution split into a formal part and one or several sub problems to be addressed by specific, lower-level patterns, which themselves must be formalised in the same way.
It is essential that for every problem (“intent”) we can enumerate every pattern that addresses it. Intents can be also classified as a taxonomy, where some intents are specialized versions of more generic intents.
This approach does not claim to formalize the full potential of patterns, it only aims at enabling tools to understand patterns that are already there so that to assist the developers for various tasks.