In their book, “Patterns-Based Engineering – Successfully Delivering Solutions via Patterns”, Lee Ackerman and Celso Gonzalez introduce PBE, the concept of a pattern implementation as an asset that “automates the application of a pattern in a particular environment”:

Specifically, PBE is a specialized approach to asset-based development that focuses on patterns, a specific type of reusable asset. PBE provides guidance and support for using patterns in a systematic, disciplined, and quantifiable way.

You can use these types of patterns to support design, testing, deployment, and other aspects of the software development lifecycle. In performing these tasks, you use patterns in many ways such as documenting, generating, refactoring, and harvesting. As a result, you are able to use patterns to boost productivity, improve quality, leverage expertise, simplify, and improve communication within an organization. The goal is to ensure that as you use and create patterns, you are doing so in a way that adds value and boosts the agility of your projects.

Similarly, ABSE uses reusable patterns (a.k.a. “Atoms”) as the basis of its model-driven approach.

ABSE patterns are coupled with metadata, giving them the necessary variability to deal with real-world applications. ABSE Atoms have borrowed concepts from OOP like inheritance and composition, allowing you to create pattern families, and build “patterns of patterns”. Atoms are glued together like Lego to form a model that has a tree-like structure. A code generator “executes” the model to obtain the desired generated artifacts.

If you want to learn to use and apply ABSE, you may start by introducing yourself to the Patterns-Based Engineering approach. It will give you a thought process and logic foundation that will be quite useful to fully understand and take advantage of ABSE and its IDE, AtomWeaver.

To buy the book, contact the authors or if you are just plain curious about PBE, stop by the PBE site.