Amelioration patterns

This strange addition to our pattern language claims to provide the holy grail of patterns. Bad code turns good using amerlioration patterns. Ward's wiki states that "an amelioration pattern is a prescription for how to edit (i.e., rearrange, add and delete) an existing situation (represented by a pattern) to achieve some further effect or behavior."

How do amelioration patterns fit in?

Amelioration patterns complete the circle of pattern types:

• Design patterns for the building blocks of code, they can be put together to create good code.
• Antipatterns show us what good code is by letting recognise bad code.
• Amelioration patterns take us from bad code to good code.
• According to Ward's wiki, these patterns do the direct opposite of Antipatterns.

Amelioration patterns are a concept that appears to have originated on Ward's wiki.

Amelioration patterns vs Refactoring

Is there a difference between these two concepts?

Known amelioration patterns

A list of know amelioration patterns:

See Also

• Refactoring