Patterns and Tools for Improving Framework Understanding: A Collaborative Approach

Software development is a social activity. Teams of developers join together to coordinate their efforts to produce software systems. This effort encompasses the development of a shared understanding surrounding multiple artifacts throughout the process. Frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse, but its complexity makes them hard to understand and learn how to use. Developers resort to their colleagues for help and insight, at the expense of time and intrusion, as documentation is often outdated and incomplete. This paper presents an approach to harness this collective knowledge of the team through a collaborative environment. Teams can share, rank and recommend their learning knowledge without too much intrusion and follow best practices of framework understanding.