A reuse case perspective on documenting frameworks

Butler, Gregory; Grogono, Peter; Khendek, Ferhat

doi:10.1109/apsec.1998.733596

Cited by 13 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The easier it is to understand the framework, the easier it would be to reuse it. Briefly, a framework is hard to understand due to a set of design aspects, the same that convey it its power [But98]:…”

Section: Understanding Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The difficulty in understanding frameworks is a serious inhibitor of effective framework reuse. This is mainly due to framework design being, frequently, very complex, and thus hard to communicate: (1) very abstract, to factor out commonality; (2) incomplete, requiring additional classes to create a working application; (3) more flexible than needed by the application at hand; (4) obscure, in the sense that it usually hides existing dependencies and interactions between classes [But98]. The learning curve becomes steep, requiring a considerable amount of effort to understand and learn how to use a framework (see Section 1.2, p. 4).…”

Section: Open Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Does it have all the answers? There are known ways of producing good documentation for frameworks [But98][BKM00] [Agu03]. The issue is nurturing the developers to easily produce and access that documentation, even during the learning process.…”

Section: Learning Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Patterns and Tools for Improving Framework Understanding: A Collaborative Approach

Flores

Aguiar

2009

2009 Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances

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Understanding a piece of software is an important activity of software development, and one with a big social emphasis. An average software project requires several people to work together in collaboration. When trying to understand programs, to maintain or evolve them, developers turn first to the code and, when that fails, to their social network, i.e., the development team. Nevertheless, it is not easy to go for the team, mainly due to the lack of expertise awareness (who to ask), wasteful interruptions of the wrong people (unclear expertise localisation) and unavailability (either due to intrusion or time constraints).Frameworks proved to be a powerful technique for large-scale reuse, but developers have to invest considerable effort to understand them. Their design is often very complex and hard to communicate, turning good quality documentation a crucial part. Producing such documentation can be costly as it needs to be easy to use, to cover different audiences, and to present different types of documents using different notations. But even if the documentation is produced with quality standards, the learners need to acquire knowledge from it and their cognitive needs must be attended. If the documentation doesn't help, or partially helps, how and where does the learner look for the knowledge needed to understand the framework and solve the task at hand?In this dissertation, the author pursues solutions to tackle these issues concerning framework understanding, aiming to answer how can framework understanding be improved and how can learners help each other without too much effort? The solutions proposed in this dissertation combine two approaches: best practices and collaborative learning.Observation and historical analysis show that understanding frameworks typically encompass a recurrent set of problems. If learners are aware of these obstacles and how to proceed to overcome them, they will surely accelerate their learning process. Therefore, a set of proven good solutions to those recurrent problems is presented in the form of patterns. These best practices aim at answering questions regarding where to start learning, at what level of abstraction should one go, how to cope with one's cognitive needs, and how to keep the knowledge produced. They provide a process of going through the documentation and, if it proves insufficient, alternative ways to gather information about the framework. To introduce collaboration into this learning experience, a collaborative environment was ii abstract developed -the DRIVER platform.The DRIVER platform is a collaborative learning environment where framework users can, in a non-intrusive way, store and share their learning knowledge while following the best practices of framework understanding (patterns). It provides a framework documentation repository, mounted on a wiki, where the learning paths (how did one learn) of the community of learners can be captured, shared, rated, and recommended. Combining these social activities, the DRIVER platform promotes coll...

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Section: Understanding Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Open Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Patterns and Tools for Improving Framework Understanding: A Collaborative Approach

Flores

Aguiar

2009

2009 Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances

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“…For each s u c h (re-)use case, we identify a set of elementary (software) engineering tasks, each w i t h its own documentation needs such needs are expressed in terms of documentation primitives. This setting is shown in Figure 1 Butler et al 1998], each with their own demands on documentation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A framework for framework documentation

Butler

Keller²,

Mili

2000

ACM Comput. Surv.

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Frameworks are quite di cult to understand when one rst uses them: the design is very abstract, to factor out commonality the design is incomplete, requiring additional subclasses to create an application the design provides exibility for several hotspots, not all of which are needed in the application at hand and the collaborations and the resulting dependencies between classes can be indirect and obscure. Many approaches to documenting frameworks have been tried, though with di erent aims and audiences in mind. In this paper, we present a task-oriented framework for framework documentation. Our framework is based on rst identifying a set of framework (re-)use cases, which w e then decompose into a set of elementary engineering tasks. Each s u c h t a s k requires a set of documentation primitives, enabling us to specify a minimal set of documentation primitives for each f r a m e w ork usage scenario. We study some major framework documentation approaches in light of this framework, identifying possible de ciences and highlighting directions for further research. Permission to make digital/hard copy of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for pro t or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior speci c permission and/or a fee. Copyright 2000 ACM 00360-0300/00/0300es 2 G. Butler, R.K. Keller and H. Mili 1. INTRODUCTION Frameworks are introducted to support the development of families of applications through reuse Fayad and Schmidt 1997 Mili et al. 1995]. The design of a framework de nes and xes certain roles and responsibilities amongst the classes, as well as standard protocols for their collaboration. The variability within the family of applications at hand is factored into so-called \hotspots" Pree 1995], and the framework provides simple mechanisms to customize each hotspot. A framework is not an easy thing to understand when one rst uses it: the design is very abstract, to factor out commonality the design is incomplete, requiring additional subclasses to create an application the design provides (too much) exibility, not all of which may be needed in the application at hand and the collaborations and the resulting dependencies between classes can be indirect and obscure. Many approaches to documenting frameworks have been tried D enomm ee 1999 Campbell andIslam 1993], though with di erent aims and audiences in mind. These different audiences | application developer, framework maintainer, and framework developer | have quite di ering needs from documentation.In this paper, we propose a framework for specifying the documentation needed for each kind of framework usage, and we study existing approaches for the extent to which they address those needs. Our approach is based on an analysis of the various fra...

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“…According to [14], framework reuse can be divided into categories according to the re-user's interests, whether a framework selector, an application developer, a framework maintainer, or a developer of other frameworks. These categories range from selecting, instantiating, flexing, composing, evolving and mining a framework.…”

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confidence: 99%

Patterns for understanding frameworks

Flores¹,

Aguiar²

2008

Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

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Learning and understanding a framework is usually a major obstacle to its effective reuse. Before being able to use a framework successfully, users often need to surpass a steep learning curve by spending a lot of effort understanding its underlying architecture and design principles. This is mainly due to users having to understand not only single isolated classes, but also complex designs of several classes whose instances collaborate for many different purposes, and using many different mechanisms. In addition, frameworks are also full of delocalized plans, and use inheritance and delegation intensively, which makes their design more difficult to grasp at a first glance. How to obtain the necessary information from the framework itself and its accompanying documentation is the main problem with framework understanding. Considering its importance, this paper presents an initial attempt to capture, in the pattern form, a set of proven solutions to recurrent problems of understanding frameworks. The fundamental objective of this work is to help non-experts on being more effective when trying to learn and understand object-oriented frameworks.The introduction of reuse in a software development process implies splitting the traditional software life cycle into two interrelated cycles: one focused on developing reusable assets, and another focused on searching and reusing reusable assets already developed.A framework is a reusable design together with an implementation. It consists of a collection of cooperating classes, both abstract and concrete, which embody an abstract design for solutions to problems in an application domain [15][16] [17].In the particular case of framework-based application development, the traditional life cycle can be organized in: a framework development life cycle devoted to build frameworks, corresponding to the abstraction phase of software reuse; and an application development life cycle (also known as framework usage) devoted to develop applications based on frameworks, corresponding to the selection, specialization, and integration phases of software reuse.Although the activities of framework development and application development are often separate and assigned to different teams, the knowledge to be shared between them is large, as the design of a framework for a domain requires considerable past experience in designing applications for that domain.In application development, frameworks act as generative artefacts as they are used as a foundation for several applications of the framework's domain. This contrasts with the traditional way of developing applications, where each application is developed from scratch. The most distinctive difference between the traditional and the framework-based development of applications is the need to map the structure of the problem to be solved onto the structure of the framework, thereby forcing the application to reuse the design of the framework. The positive side of this is that we don't need to design the application from scratch. But, on th...

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A reuse case perspective on documenting frameworks

Cited by 13 publications

References 27 publications

Patterns and Tools for Improving Framework Understanding: A Collaborative Approach

Patterns and Tools for Improving Framework Understanding: A Collaborative Approach

A framework for framework documentation

Patterns for understanding frameworks

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