Hot-Spot-Driven Framework Development

Most excellent object-oriented frameworks are still the product of a more or less chaotic development process, typically carried out in the realm of research-like settings. Overall, flexibility has to be injected into a framework in appropriate doses1. Framework adaptation takes place at points of predefined refinement that we call hot spots. As the quality of a framework depends directly on the appropriateness of hot spots, hot spot identification has to become an explicit activity in the framework development process. Means for documenting and communicating hot spots between domain experts and software engineers become crucial. This contribution first discusses the few essential framework construction principles, that is, how to keep object-oriented architectures flexible for adaptations. We introduce hot spot cards as means to capture flexibility requirements, and illustrate how to apply them in combination with the essential framework construction principles. The presented heuristics form a hot-spot-driven framework design process which leads to a more systematic framework construction with fewer (re)design iterations.