Patterns and their Impact on System Concerns

Making the link between architectural decisions and system concerns explicit is a major contribution that patterns can make. Over the past decade, there have been several efforts to close the gap between requirements and architecture by using patterns. In this paper, our goal is to take a step back and survey these different contributions, as well as related efforts in other communities (such as the work on aspect-oriented requirements engineering). From these, we identify common elements and present a perspective on how to move forward. This thematic track on Pragmatic and Systematic Approaches in Applying Patterns should provide a good conduit for this discussion.