Uma abordagem híbrida para construção de documentação para apoio à instanciação de frameworks

Abstract

Software reuse is one of the major goals in Software Engineering. Frameworks promote the reuse of individual building blocks, but also of system design. Framework instantiation is the construction of an application reusing a framework. This process requires a substantial understanding effort of the framework. So, high quality documentation may be a useful resource to minimize this effort. However, in most cases, appropriate documentation neither exists nor is up-to-date. A hypothesis is that the framework code itself and existing instantiations could provide useful information for new instantiations. However, in this case developers still would have to read large portions of code. The goal of this thesis is to demonstrate the feasibility of constructing relevant documentation for framework instantiation with static and dynamic analysis of the framework itself and pre-existing instantiations. The proposal is presenting the documentation in a cookbook style, where recipes are composed of programming tasks and information about framework elements related to a desired feature. Initially, two preliminary experiments were conducted to evaluate coverage and practical usefulness of the recipe information for developers. Results pointed out the need for some adjustments, but also indicated sufficient and relevant information in recipes. Finally, we performed a robust study, consisting of three experiments with 44 human subjects, and 88 executions of real framework instantiations. We compared the use of cookbooks with the use of traditional framework documentation. The generated cookbooks presented results better or as good as traditional framework documentation, in terms of correctness, time spent and the satisfaction perception of document uses.