The effect of object-oriented frameworks on developer productivity

Moser, Simon; Nierstrasz, Oscar

doi:10.1109/2.536783

Cited by 85 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…This approach has many advantages, such as reuse of the functionality provided (Moser and Nierstrasz 1996) and increased productivity (Konstantopoulos et al 2009). However, in spite of these benefits, there are potential challenges that come along, for both the framework developer and the developer who uses the functionality from the framework (Bosch et al 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eclipse API usage: the good and the bad

2013

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Today, when constructing software systems, many developers build their systems on top of frameworks. Eclipse is such a framework that has been in existence for over a decade. Like many other evolving software systems, the Eclipse platform has both stable and supported interfaces (''good'') and unstable, discouraged and unsupported interfaces (''bad''). In this study, we investigate Eclipse interface usage by Eclipse thirdparty plug-ins (ETPs) based on whether they use bad interfaces or not. The investigations, based on empirical analysis present the following observations. First, we discovered that 44 % of the 512 analyzed Eclipse third-party plug-ins depend on ''bad'' interfaces and that developers continue to use ''bad'' interfaces. Second, we have observed that plug-ins that use or extend at least one ''bad'' interface are comparatively larger and use more functionality from Eclipse than those that use only ''good'' interfaces. Third, the findings show that the ETPs use a diverse set of ''bad'' interfaces. Fourth, we observed that the reason why the bad interfaces are being eliminated from the ETPs' source code is, because (ETP developers believe) these non-APIs will cause incompatibilities when a version of the ETP is ported to new Eclipse SDK release. Finally, we observed that when developers eliminate problematic ''bad'' interfaces, they either re-implement the same functionality in their own API, find equivalent SDK good interfaces, or completely delete the entities in the ETPs' source code that use the functionality from the ''bad'' interfaces.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eclipse API usage: the good and the bad

2013

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“…This approach has many advantages, such as reuse of the functionality provided [2] and increasing productivity [3]. However, these benefits are accompanied by co-evolutionary challenges that come along with using frameworks [4]: as the framework evolves, it makes changes to its APIs and these changes may cause the applications that use them to fail [5]- [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, these benefits are accompanied by co-evolutionary challenges that come along with using frameworks [4]: as the framework evolves, it makes changes to its APIs and these changes may cause the applications that use them to fail [5]- [7]. Framework-based applications are, therefore, subject to two dimensions of survival: 1) survival related to releasing new versions of the application itself, and 2) survival related to new framework releases 2 . In this work we focus on a popular framework, Eclipse, and study survival of Eclipse third-party plug-ins (ETPs).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Survival of Eclipse third-party plug-ins

Businge

Serebrenik

Brand

2012

2012 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM)

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Abstract-Today numerous software systems are being developed on top of frameworks. In this study, we analyzed the survival of 467 Eclipse third-party plug-ins altogether having 1,447 versions. We classify these plug-ins into two categories: those that depend on only stable and supported Eclipse APIs and those that depend on at least one of the potentially unstable, discouraged and unsupported Eclipse non-APIs.Comparing the two categories of plug-ins, we observed that the plug-ins depending solely on APIs have a very high source compatibility success rate compared to those that depend on at least one of the non-APIs. However, we have also observed that recently released plug-ins that depend on non-APIs also have a very high forward source compatibility success rate. This high source compatibility success rate is due to the dependency structure of these plug-ins: recently released plug-ins that depend on non-APIs predominantly depend on old Eclipse nonAPIs rather than on newly introduced ones. Finally, we showed that the majority of plug-ins hosted on SourceForge do not evolve beyond the first year of release.

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“…They are promoted as having the potential to provide the benefits of large-scale reuse [GHJV95] [BMR + 96] [FSJ99]. While practical evidence does suggest that framework usage can increase reusability and decrease development effort [MN96], experience has identified a number of issues that hinder framework application and limit potential benefits [BMMB99]. One of the major challenges is effective framework understanding -a specialised kind of program comprehension.…”

Section: Tool Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns and Tools for Improving Framework Understanding: A Collaborative Approach

Flores

Aguiar

2009

2009 Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances

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Understanding a piece of software is an important activity of software development, and one with a big social emphasis. An average software project requires several people to work together in collaboration. When trying to understand programs, to maintain or evolve them, developers turn first to the code and, when that fails, to their social network, i.e., the development team. Nevertheless, it is not easy to go for the team, mainly due to the lack of expertise awareness (who to ask), wasteful interruptions of the wrong people (unclear expertise localisation) and unavailability (either due to intrusion or time constraints).Frameworks proved to be a powerful technique for large-scale reuse, but developers have to invest considerable effort to understand them. Their design is often very complex and hard to communicate, turning good quality documentation a crucial part. Producing such documentation can be costly as it needs to be easy to use, to cover different audiences, and to present different types of documents using different notations. But even if the documentation is produced with quality standards, the learners need to acquire knowledge from it and their cognitive needs must be attended. If the documentation doesn't help, or partially helps, how and where does the learner look for the knowledge needed to understand the framework and solve the task at hand?In this dissertation, the author pursues solutions to tackle these issues concerning framework understanding, aiming to answer how can framework understanding be improved and how can learners help each other without too much effort? The solutions proposed in this dissertation combine two approaches: best practices and collaborative learning.Observation and historical analysis show that understanding frameworks typically encompass a recurrent set of problems. If learners are aware of these obstacles and how to proceed to overcome them, they will surely accelerate their learning process. Therefore, a set of proven good solutions to those recurrent problems is presented in the form of patterns. These best practices aim at answering questions regarding where to start learning, at what level of abstraction should one go, how to cope with one's cognitive needs, and how to keep the knowledge produced. They provide a process of going through the documentation and, if it proves insufficient, alternative ways to gather information about the framework. To introduce collaboration into this learning experience, a collaborative environment was ii abstract developed -the DRIVER platform.The DRIVER platform is a collaborative learning environment where framework users can, in a non-intrusive way, store and share their learning knowledge while following the best practices of framework understanding (patterns). It provides a framework documentation repository, mounted on a wiki, where the learning paths (how did one learn) of the community of learners can be captured, shared, rated, and recommended. Combining these social activities, the DRIVER platform promotes coll...

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The effect of object-oriented frameworks on developer productivity

Cited by 85 publications

References 2 publications

Eclipse API usage: the good and the bad

Eclipse API usage: the good and the bad

Survival of Eclipse third-party plug-ins

Patterns and Tools for Improving Framework Understanding: A Collaborative Approach

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