John Wiley and Sons of Chichester, England, had commissioned a potentially important book from Frank Buschmann and his co-authors at Siemens AG, Munich on the work of the international Patterns movement in software architecture.

The Patterns movement is dedicated to the elaboration and formalisation of patterns in software architecture. It was inspired by the work of the American architect Christopher Alexander. Its effort is aimed at the extraction and re-use of software architectural components based on known successful implementations. A well-known example is Client-Server. Patterns are a ‘leading-edge’ aspect of software engineering research.

The authors were all native German speakers. Our brief was to ‘translate’ their inflected English into a readable and uniform style, while simultaneously compiling the book and maintaining its templates. Working entirely over the Internet, transferring chapters and sections as e-mail attachments, we were able not only to achieve this, but to help co-ordination between the authors, provide some useful suggestions for the book, take some management load from the commissioning editor and help keep the project on plan.

A System of Patterns - Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture (ISBN 0 471 958697) was published in June 1996. The book subsequently won a JOLT Software Productivity Award, presented annually by Software Design magazine in the USA for products felt to have most influence on the progress of software technology.

	See examples of developmental editing, showing extracts of the author’s drafts in ‘before’ and ‘after’ states.
	Visit the Patterns home page for more information about the work of the Patterns community in software architecture.

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