James Siddle sends us a preprint of his paper “Choose Your Own Architecture – interactive pattern storytelling,” about to be published in the patterns journal Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming.
It’s about adapting the Choose Your Own Adventure format to help readers learn the pros and cons of using different Design Patterns.
The idea is to develop interactive stories where reader decisions are based around design choices, and where different story paths illustrate the consequences of the reader’s decisions in terms of the system being built.
So for example the reader may be faced with a decision about how to handle logging or request handling in a web application, and the design choices they make result in different qualities or side effects. The Design Patterns make up the optimal ‘good’ choices, while other paths lead to problematic designs or undesired consequences.
The paper has a great illustration about halfway through that really captures the spirit of the idea – I think it would go really well with any posting. The illustration is by Maisie Platts.
Choose Your Own Architecture – interactive pattern storytelling (PDF)
(Thanks, James!)