Understanding Frameworks Collaboratively : Tool Requirements

Software development is a social activity. Teams of developers join together to coordinate their efforts to produce software systems. This effort encompasses the development of a shared understanding surrounding multiple artifacts throughout the process. Frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse, but their complexity often makes them hard to understand and learn how to use. Developers resort to their colleagues for help and insight, at the expense of time and intrusion, as documentation is often outdated and incomplete. This paper presents a study on the state-of-the art on program comprehension, framework understanding and collaborative software environments, proposing a set of requirements for developing tools to improve the understanding of frameworks in a collaborative way.