Patterns for Documenting Frameworks – Part I

Good design and implementation are necessary but not sufficient pre-requisites for the successful reuse of object-oriented frameworks. Although not always recognized, good documentation is crucial for effective framework reuse, and comes with many issues. Defining and writing good quality documentation for a framework is often hard, costly, and tiresome, especially when not aware of its key problems and good solutions for them. This document contributes two patterns to the work in progress of writing a pattern language that describe proven solutions to recurrent problems of documenting objectoriented frameworks. The patterns aim at helping non-experts on cost-effectively documenting object-oriented frameworks. The two initial patterns here presented address the problems of guiding the readers on the documentation and introducing the framework, respectively the patterns “DOCUMENTATION ROADMAP” and “FRAMEWORK OVERVIEW”.