Characterizing stability in evolving frameworks

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. Frameworks generally evolve through a number of iterations due to the incorporation of new requirements and better domain understanding. Since changes to frameworks have a large impact on the applications build based on the asset, it is important to assess the stability of a framework. Recently, an approach for assessing framework stability has been proposed. We have extended and applied the assessment approach on one proprietary telecommunication framework and two commercial GUI application frameworks. Based on our findings we formulate a set of hypotheses, which characterize the stability of an object-oriented application framework. We believe these hypotheses to be the most promising ones for further studies of framework stability.