Developing Active Help for Framework Instantiation Through Case-Based Reasoning

Object-oriented frameworks are sophisticated software artifacts that significantly impact productivity when building applications in a given domain. However, frameworks are complex and hard to master, and it remains an open problem to find a cost-effective solution for documenting them. This paper presents the case-based approach of FrameDoc to framework documentation and reuse. By means of explicit knowledge representation and CBR, FrameDoc assists a novel user of the framework in the process of building new applications, by maintaining a case base of previous framework instantiations where relevant past cases can be retrieved and reused. The approach proposes both a methodology for framework documentation, and a tool that helps the user when reusing a framework through the knowledge represented in the documentation.