Framework Instantiation Using Cookbooks Constructed with Static and Dynamic Analysis

Software reuse is one of the major goals in software engineering. Frameworks promote the reuse of not only individual building blocks, but also of system design. However, framework instantiation requires a substantial understanding effort. High quality documentation is essential to minimize this effort. However, in most cases, appropriate documentation does not exist or is not updated. Our hypothesis is that the framework code itself and existing instantiations can serve as a guide for new instantiations. The challenge is that users still have to read large portions of code, which hinders the understanding process, thus our goal is to provide relevant information for framework instantiation with static and dynamic analysis of the framework and pre-existing instantiations. The final documentation is presented in a cookbook style, where recipes are composed of programming tasks and information about hotspots related to a feature instantiation. We conducted two preliminary experiments, the first to evaluate the recall of the approach and the second to study the practical usefulness of the recipe information for developers. Results reveal that our approach discloses accurate and relevant information about classes and methods used for framework instantiation.