Book excerpt: Enterprise Patterns and MDA teaches you how to customize any archetype pattern–such as Customer, Product, and Order–to reflect the idiosyncrasies of your own business environment. Because all the patterns work harmoniously together and have clearly documented relationships to each other, you’ll come away with a host of reusable solutions to common problems in business-software design. This book shows you how using a pattern or a fragment of a pattern can save you months of work and help you avoid costly errors. You’ll also discover how–when used in literate modeling–patterns can solve the difficult challenge of communicating UML models to broad audiences. The configurable patterns can be used manually to create executable code. However, the authors draw on their extensive experience to show you how to tap the significant power of MDA and UML for maximum automation. Not surprisingly, the patterns included in this book are highly valuable; a blue-chip company recently valued a similar, but less mature, set of patterns at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Use this practical guide to increase the efficiency of your designs and to create robust business applications that can be applied immediately in a business setting.