The software architecture and the design pattern communities have overlapping interests. The software architecture community is chiefly concerned with structure and organization of large software systems; the patterns community with exposition of design information. These intersect in the exposition of design information at the system level. This essay lays out aframework for the software architecture community to consider (a) what new ADL capability is suggested by design patterns and (b) to what extent ADLsare appropriately carriers of pattern information, and how they should do so.

Preferred citation: Mary Shaw and Paul Clements, How should patterns influence architecture description languages?, Working paper for DARPA EDCS community, Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department and the Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1996, unpaginated.