Domain Model of a Pattern Language for Class Responsibility Assignment for Information Systems

Assigning class responsibility is a design decision to be made early in the design phase in software development, bridging analysis modeling and design modeling. However, it heavily relies on the expertise and experience of the developer and has been ad-hoc. The existing work describes general stepwise guidelines, but does not provide concrete methods. In this paper, we present a pattern language that helps identifying and assigning class responsibilities for applications in the information systems domain. The presented pattern language consists of eight patterns. Before presenting the patterns for class responsibility assignment, we introduce a domain model which provides idioms for the composition of each pattern. The participating roles in the domain model are explained. We pick up a pattern specification and explain the way of composing the pattern.