Acceptance Criteria Summary

Presenting a pattern

• Consider using a known form before using your own presentation form.
• If you are using your own form, make sure that your readers will understand it and don't get lost.
• Experimentation with form is encouraged, but should be done wisely and with much reflection.
• You can both use a bullet by bullet style or a more discursive one. Several participants of the discussion, though, admired the discursive nature of Christoper Alexander's presentation of patterns.

• A pattern description should contain at least three known uses, preferably from different unrelated projects. This is considered important, since otherwise a pattern cannot be distinguished from a clever design which has yet to be proved to be a recurring pattern. Consider Jerry Weinberg: "Once is an event; twice is a coincidence; three times is a pattern."

• Discuss similar patterns and distinguish your pattern from them. Try to show that your pattern(s) are not just a minor variation.
• Discuss related patterns which make sense to be used in the context of your pattern application (just like the Related Patterns section in the Design Patterns book).

• no hard rules apply, but consider the following issues:
• motivate and think about the ordering of your patterns
• clarify dependencies between patterns (which depend on which?)
• clarify your application domain
• discuss completeness and limits of your patterns.

• Tool papers should prove their usefulness over technical novelty.
• Tool papers should prove their viability using some well known problems.
• No candidate model problems have been defined yet, but this is an option for the future.

• Clear technical writing is preferred over academic diction and theory.
• The paper should abstain from speculation but only discuss issues based on experience.
• The core of a pattern paper should be very concise. Supporting material can be more elaborate.
• The writing style depends to some extent on the paper category and the intended readership, so keep in mind who you are addressing.

• Currently, 10 pages are defined as the limit for the conference. For the proceedings, it shouldn't become much longer.
• The limit for pattern languages or the like is slightly higher, about 15 pages.
• All limits apply to "ordinarily" formatted papers. 10 regular pages correspond to 20 pages using the proceedings' template, which is rather generous with respect to space.