They facilitate restructuring a system whether or not it was designed with patterns in mind. For the longest time I thought item 1 provided the bulk of the benefit. Now I realize that item 2 is at least as important. My guess is megabytes if not gigabytes. With so much communication going on, anything that makes it incrementally more efficient would yield substantial time savings.
Patterns effectively expand people's communication bandwidth.
In short, patterns are primarily food for the brain, not fodder for a tool. There may yet be latent benefit in methodological or automated support, but I'm convinced it'll be icing on the cake, not the cake itself or even a layer thereof. The misconceptions I've looked at so far have to do with what patterns are . Now for a few misconceptions about what patterns can do . This one's easy, because patterns don't guarantee anything.