DRIVER -- A Platform for Collaborative Framework Understanding

Application frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse but often very hard to learn from scratch. Although good documentation helps on reducing the learning curve, it is often found lacking, and costly, as it needs to attend different audiences with disparate learning needs. When code and documentation prove insufficient, developers turn to their network of experts. The lack of awareness about the experts, interrupting the wrong people, and experts unavailability are well known hindrances to effective collaboration. This paper presents the DRIVER platform, a collaborative learning environment for framework users to share their knowledge. It provides the documentation on a wiki, where the learning paths of the community of learners can be captured, shared, rated, and recommended, thus tapping into the collective knowledge of the community of framework users. The tool can be obtained at http://bit.ly/driverTool.