I came across this fairly short article on Computer Weekly earlier. It highlights an agile success story. Given the current hot-topic of off-shoring, there is an interesting quote in the article that will sit well with many home based IT people:

"The idea that the way to maximise your development budget is to find the lowest-cost people you can is fundamentally flawed,...

...If you are able to reach out and attract the real experts in the software field and give them real freedom, and have given them projects that are challenging, you will get much more bang for your buck than if you offshore."

When I finished reading the article I couldn't help wishing that all IT managers thought like that.

When we think "design-pattern", we are typically referring to logical level design-patterns, such as those presented in the seminal books on design-patterns ([1], [2] for example). These logical-level patterns provide structural and behavioural solutions to common problems when developing object-oriented software. These patterns are considered logical because they are independent of the programming language - for example - you can apply the Composite or Decorator pattern in C++, C#, Java, Smalltalk, or any programming language that is object-oriented.

An implementation-pattern (or an idiom), is simply a pattern that exists at the physical level. Typically they will be specific to a particular programming language and may well take advantage of a construct or concept specific to that programming language. There are many well documented implementation-patterns that are used in C# for example:

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