Experience Paper: Effort Distribution in a Six-Year Industrial Application Framework Project

It has for a long time been claimed that object-oriented framework technology delivers reduced application development efforts but no quantitative evidence has been shown. In this study we present quantitative data from a six year object-oriented application framework project in the telecommunication domain. During six years four major versions of the application framework have been developed and over 30 installations at customer sites has been done. We present effort data both for the framework development and the installations as well as relative effort per phase for the framework versions. The effort data presented gives quantitative support for the claim that framework technology delivers reduced application development efforts. In fact, the effort data shows that the average application development effort is less than 2% of the framework development effort.