Accelerating crosscutting framework reuse using a model-based approach

Abstract

Infrastructure frameworks are used to accelerate the development of information systems. These frameworks encompass software concerns commonly used in the information system domain, e.g. “persistence”, “authentication” and “concurrency”. Although these functionalities improve productivity, the reuse process is still heavily based on writing source code, which forces the development teams to learn low level details of the frameworks being reused, causing the reuse process to be entirely performed during implementation phases. In this article, the focus is on Crosscutting Frameworks, which modularize specific types of software concerns. Since these frameworks can also be infrastructure frameworks, in this article, a new model-driven process is applied in a persistence crosscutting framework. A tool was created to support the process, which was successfully evaluated in an empirical study. This process was compared to the conventional process in an empirical study in order to evaluate the efforts needed to successfully reuse the framework. In our study, the tool usage has reduced the reuse process time by more than 97%.