Identifying and addressing problems in framework reuse

Object-oriented frameworks are a powerful form of reuse but they can be difficult to understand and reuse correctly. Over the last decade a large range of candidate documentation techniques have been proposed to address this difficulty. There is little research, however, to identify the specific problems that arise during framework reuse and to evaluate documentation techniques in terms of these problems. This paper reports on a long-term investigation that firstly identifies four fundamental problems of framework reuse: mapping, understanding functionality, understanding interactions and understanding the framework architecture. It then describes two forms of documentation specifically developed to address the mapping, interaction and functionality problems namely a pattern language and a set of micro architectures. An in-depth, qualitative analysis of these two documentation types evaluates the key strengths and weaknesses of their support for framework understanding, whilst confirming the significance of the four problem categories.