An integrated approach for documenting, exploring, and building framework-based software

The use of well-designed class libraries and frameworks is a key element of object oriented software development. However, while frameworks may significantly reduce development time and cost, they are difficult to understand and therefore hard to learn to use. We present an environment that supports documenting, browsing and editing of selected aspects of frameworks and framework based applications on an abstraction level that is not available through static or dynamic program analysis. The main ideas of this environment are a specialized desktop metaphor for visualizing and browsing software architectures, the support of framework based development by means of architecture templates, and an open tool architecture that supports the integration of any additional tools for visualizing and editing application and framework parts.