Evolving Custom-Made Applications into Domain-Specific Frameworks

Framework development involves many challenges, from a technical as well as a managerial point of view: reuse documentation, proliferation of versions, effort estimation, delta analysis, architectural drift. Several of these challenges are not, or scarcely, addressed by current OOA/OOD methodologies nor by the framework literature. We elaborate on the experiences we had with building a framework for developing commercial applications in the market of broadcast planning. In particular it is shown how we dealt with these challenges during the development of the framework. Reuse contracts are put forward as an indicative solution to a number of problems we encountered.