Evolution Characteristics of an Industrial Application Framework
Michael Mattsson · 1999
Object-oriented application frameworks present one of the most successful approaches to developing reusable assets in industry, but developing frameworks is both difficult and expensive. Framework generally evolve through a number of iterations due to the incorporation of new requirements and better domain understanding. In this paper we present experiences from a proprietary black-box application framework in the telecommunication domain. During six years four major version of the application framework has been developed and over 30 installations at customer sites has been done. We present effort data for the framework development [13] as well as framework-specific data for a set of metrics which have been used in [12] for formulating six hypotheses about framework stability. In this paper we provide information for presenting four of the hypotheses. The effort data gives quantitative support for the claim that framework technology delivers reduced application development efforts. In ...