Methodologies for the design of application frameworks: systematic review

Abstract

Framework design for application development allows to reuse design patterns and code, speeding up the production of software in a same domain. However, in order to design a framework, it is required a considerable time before a functional product is ready to use, and it is essential to design following the best practices. The lack of a guide with current methodologies for framework development was the main motivation to pursue this systematic review. In this paper, the results of the systematic review to find the methodologies for framework development in the context of software engineering are reported and analyzed. The initial search threw 13,624 documents, from which only 30 references were relevant after refinement. The analysis of these documents provided evidence of diverse methodologies for framework development, which adopt UML for their definition. On the other hand, whereas some works emphasize the structure to support the functionality, others prioritize the behavior of the classes. The analysis of the results suggests the use of UML in the design process, the implementation of design patterns, the identification of hot-spots, and the recognition of black-box and white-box frameworks.