Formalizing Design Patterns: A Comprehensive Contract for Composite

Software patterns are used almost universally across design communities as the preferred mechanism for communicating best practice. And while the design archetypes captured by patterns continue to exert significant influence on software design decisions, there is no rigorous foundation for ensuring implementation correctness or reasoning about the systems in which patterns are applied. In this paper, we attempt to identify the conceptual elements necessary of any pattern formalism that satisfies these validation and reasoning objectives. We then present an overview of a particular pattern formalism developed as part of our prior work. The Composite pattern is used as a demonstrative example.