Transitioning from observation to patterns: A real-world example

The systems engineering community of practitioners, researchers, and educators are in the process of transitioning to model-based systems engineering within a broader context of digital engineering. Industry is investing significantly to support this transition to ensure an appropriate and responsive digital engineering infrastructure to support research, engineering, and development teams. While this infrastructure must contend with the requisite computational resources, sufficient attention must also be given to tools, methods, and the underlying systems engineering and architecting methodology. An element of this methodology is a well-curated library of architectural and design patterns available to engineers. These patterns represent deep domain knowledge and experience within an application or technology domain if done right. Therein lies the focus of this chapter: How to best leverage patterns and a pattern language as a methodology for capturing and documenting tacit domain knowledge inherent in any high-performance engineering organization? This chapter outlines an approach to develop design patterns in a technology domain.