Leveraging Framework Documentation Solutions for Intermediate Users in Knowledge Acquisition

Frameworks are increasingly employed as a useful way to enable object-oriented reuse. However, understanding frameworks is not easy due to their size and complexity. Previous work concentrated on different ways to document frameworks, but it was unclear which ones actually were better. This paper presents a novel way of investigating the different philosophies for framework documentation. The philosophies include minimalist, patterns-style and extended javadoc (Jdoc) documentation. Using a survey of 90 intermediate users engaged in Command and Adaptor design patterns coding work, this exploratory study discovered that minimalist documentation has positive impacts in encouraging knowledge acquisition, significantly in terms of the framework functional workings. This concludes that documentation solutions with the minimalist principle can lead intermediate users to faster growth in learning two of the design patterns.