Documentation scheme for object oriented frameworks

Abstract

The software reuse is widely believed to be a key factor for improving software productivity as well as quality. One of the technologies promoting the reuse is object oriented frameworks, which can facilitate large scale reuse. Unfortunately, frameworks often pose a steep learning curve. To alleviate this problem, a documentation scheme for frameworks should consider specific aspects of frameworks. In this thesis, we propose a documentation scheme for frameworks. First, to propose an appropriate documentation scheme, we identify three major problems arising from documenting a framework: (1) the changed role of developers, (2) the difficulty of understanding the behavior of a framework, and (3) the size of the collection of many, seemingly unrelated classes in a framework. Our documentation scheme consists of three parts: overview, structural patterns, and behavioral patterns. We focus on representing collaborations among classes as a concrete work product to capture the delocalized strategy and providing a higher-level abstraction than classes and their methods. And we demonstrate a design process based on the proposed documentation scheme to show the effectiveness of our approach.