Incremental Development Using Object Oriented Frameworks: A Case Study

Jason Hallstrom and Neelam Soundarajan
Computer and Information Science, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

TOOLS USA 2002
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Abstract

The object oriented framework-based approach is one of the most powerful approaches to incremental development. In this paper we report on our experiences in applying the framework-based approach to the domain of genetic algorithms. Although different genetic algorithm (GA) systems have much in common with each other, each such system is typically designed and implemented from scratch. Our goal was to design an OO framework that included those aspects that are common to different GA systems, with individual GA systems being implemented as applications on top of this framework. We show how such an incremental approach to implementing GA systems not only leads to code reuse but also to reuse of the effort involved in reasoning about the behavior of such systems. We also discuss how the XML-documentation mechanism of C# can be used to generate precise documentation for frameworks.


1 INTRODUCTION

An object-oriented (OO) framework [4] is essentially a set of abstract and concrete classes that collaborate in a precise manner to provide a common framework on which a range of applications can be built. The collaboration is in the form of key methods, referred to as template methods in the design patterns literature [6], that direct the flow-of-control and call appropriate methods, these being the hook methods, of various classes. In order to implement a complete application on such a framework, the application developer provides definitions for the hook methods that implement behavior appropriate to the particular application; a different developer could produce a different application by providing an alternate set of definitions for the hook methods. Thus the framework implements behavior that is common to the various applications that may be built on it, and the individual application enriches the common behavior as appropriate to the particular application by defining the hook methods appropriately. If the framework provides the right hooks, an entire new application can be developed with just the incremental effort involved in designing a new set of definitions for the hook methods.

In this paper we report on our experiences in using the framework-based approach to the domain of genetic algorithms [9,14,15]. Genetic algorithms (GA) have been developed for a variety of domains [3,7,10,16]. Although different GA systems have much in common with each other, indeed it is this commonality that characterizes them as GA systems, typically each such system is designed and implemented from scratch. Our goal was to design an OO framework that included the common aspects of GA systems, with individual GA systems being implemented as applications on this framework. But mere code reuse is not the main point of frameworks. More important is the reuse of the common behavior embedded in the framework's design. Or to put it somewhat differently, the approach makes it possible to reuse, in understanding the behavior of each application built on the framework, the effort that has gone into understanding the behavior built into the framework. Therefore, the second important aspect of our work was to reason about our GA framework, and see how the resulting specifications can be reused when understanding the individual applications built on the framework.

The main contributions of this paper may be summarized as follows:

  • It presents a GA framework as a case-study in the use of the framework-based approach; and presents a simple example GA system built on this framework.
  • It shows how the framework based approach makes it possible not only to build related applications in an incremental manner, but also to specify and understand the behavior of such applications incrementally.
  • It reports on our experiences with using the XML-documentation mechanisms of the C# compiler to provide precise documentation for frameworks.

We should stress that with respect to genetic algorithms, our paper does not break any new ground; the GA we build as an 'application' on our framework is fairly simple. However, a GA-expert who uses our framework should be able to experiment with new genetic algorithms easily since the framework will allow him or her to focus on whatever is new or unique to the algorithm in question and ignore those aspects that are common to all GAs. Indeed, that is precisely the point of using a framework.

The paper is organized as follows: The next section provides background on GAs and summarizes the main issues in reasoning about frameworks and applications. Section 3 presents the design of our framework; the key classes are described along with specifications of the most interesting methods; and we discuss the type of precise documentation we use for the framework. Section 4 presents a simple GA application built on our framework, and shows how we can reason about its behavior incrementally from the behavior of the framework. The final section summarizes our work and provides some pointers to future work.


2 BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION

Genetic Algorithms

In essence, a genetic algorithm works as follows: The program maintains a population of individuals where each individual represents a potential solution to the problem at hand. The program goes through a series of iterations. In each iteration, the fitness of each individual is evaluated using some appropriate measure and a new population formed by selecting the fitter individuals. Some members of the new population may undergo transformations by means of "genetic" operations such as mutation (a unary transformation) and crossover (a binary transformation), giving the population for the next generation; this continues for a number of iterations, after which the program typically converges to a good, or even near-optimal, solution. Because of the similarity to natural selection and evolution in biological systems, individuals are also referred to as chromosomes. Pictorially, the structure of such algorithms may be represented [5] as in Figure 1. In [14], Michalewicz presents the code for a genetic algorithm with instructions on which sections of the code have to be replaced to implement other GA systems. As is widely recognized in the OO community, this type of code reuse by "cutting-and-pasting" can lead to serious problems due to unanticipated interactions between the new code and the old code.


Figure 1: Structure of genetic algorithms

One important point not explicit in Fig. 1 is that the selection operation involves the notion of 'parents' that are combined to produce `children' who form the new population. This will be clear in our framework. Thus while pictures such as Fig. 1 convey an intuition for the underlying structure, the framework captures it fully and formally. And, of course, it ensures that we do not have to repeatedly code this common structure as part of each GA's implementation.

Framework and application behavior

The standard approach to reasoning about an OO system is to use precise specifications in the form of pre- and post- conditions for each operation of each class C of the system. The pre-condition of an operation specifies the condition that must be satisfied at the time the operation is invoked; it may involve the values of any arguments that the operation receives, as well as the values of any of the attributes of C . The post-condition similarly tells us what conditions will be satisfied by the values of the arguments and the attributes of C when the operation finishes. And, in the case of operations that return a result, it also provides information about the result. The pre- and post-condition specifications embody the principle of Design by Contract (DBC) [12]: If the client satisfies her part of the contract, that of ensuring the pre-condition of the operation at the time of the call to the operation, then (and only then) the service provider guarantees his part of the contract, that of ensuring the post-condition at the time the operation finishes.

Let us now see how this applies when reasoning about frameworks and applications. Let F be a framework and A an application built on it. Suppose h() is a hook method, i.e., a method of a class C of the framework and that h() is redefined in A in the corresponding derived class D. As part of the specification of F, we would have established suitable pre- and post-conditions for1 C.h(); and when reasoning, in F, about the behavior of any template method t() that invokes h(), we would have appealed to this F-level specification of h(). In order to ensure that this reasoning about the behavior of t() remains valid in A, we must require that D.h() satisfies this F-level specification of h() since, in A, it is D.h() that t() will invoke. In other words, we must require D as well as other classes in the application A to be behavioral subtypes [11] of their respective base classes.

But this, by itself, is not sufficient. The reason we redefined h() in A is so that it will exhibit behavior that is tailored to the needs of A , rather than just the generic behavior implemented in its framework-level definition. More important, and the whole point of the framework-based approach, is that template methods such as t() that invoke h() will also, as a result of the redefinition of h(), exhibit appropriate application-specific behavior although they (the template methods) themselves are inherited unchanged from the framework. Correspondingly, we need to be able to reason about this application-specific behavior of t(). And in doing this, we should not have to go back to the code of the framework2. To be able to do this, we must include suitable additional information in the F-level specification of t() beyond what is normally contained in the pre- and post-conditions of t(), so that when A is built, we can arrive at the corresponding A -specific behavior of t() by "plugging-in" the behavior of the hook methods as (re-)defined in A , into this F -level specification of t().

What additional information do we need concerning the behavior of t() to be able to arrive at its A-specific behavior? In a typical application, we introduce new attributes in the derived classes defined in the application and redefine the hook methods so that they manipulate these new attributes appropriately. Therefore, when t() invokes these hook methods in A, the execution of t() will also affect these new attributes, the precise effects being dependent on which particular hook methods it invokes, in what order, how many times, and with what argument values. Hence it is this information about these hook-method invocations that we need to include in the specification of t(). One possible approach [2,17] to doing this is in terms of a trace or sequence that records these invocations. While this works, the resulting specifications are rather unwieldy and complex. So in the next section we will use a more "programmer-friendly" notation to express this information. As we will see, given a specification for t() that includes this additional information, we will be able, once A is designed and the richer behaviors of the hook methods specified, to plug these richer behaviors into the F-specification of t() to arrive at the A-specific behavior of t() without having to reanalyze its code.


3 GA FRAMEWORK

Our GA framework consists of four classes, Chromosome, ChromosomePopulation, GAFController, and GAReporter. The main hook methods are in the Chromosome class. This is to be expected since the key differences between one GA and another are the differences in the behaviors of their respective chromosome types. When building a new GA, most of the work will consist of (re)defining Chromosome's hook methods. GAFController contains the key template method, runGA(), that implements the evolutionary algorithm common to all GAs. ChromosomePopulation is used to represent the evolving population. GAReporter allows the framework to report the results of the algorithm; this class's methods may also be redefined in the application, allowing us to customize the reports for the particular application. We focus on Chromosome and GAFController3.

Chromosome class

The Chromosome class appears4 in Fig. 2. Fitness is a get-only property corresponding to the fitness of the individual in question. It is declared abstract since the precise details of how the fitness value is computed will obviously depend on the particular type of chromosome and hence will be defined in the application. Similarly, the Mutate() operation which (very likely, probabilistically) will modify the chromosome object will also be defined in the application.



Figure 2: Chromosome class

CrossOver() is a key operation of GAs involving combining two "parent" chromosomes to obtain two "child" chromosomes; cOther is the other chromosome object which will be "crossed-over" with the current chromosome object to obtain the children chromosomes. This too will be defined in the application since how children chromosomes are created from parents depends on the particular GA. ToString() returns a representation of the current chromosome to be used by GAReporter to print out information about the chromosomes; the string representation of a chromosome object will of course depend on the type of the chromosome, so this also is an abstract operation. The final operation AreInOrder() allows us to compare two chromosome objects to see if they are "in-order" based, possibly, on their fitnesses. This operation will also, typically, be defined in the derived class of the application, but we have provided a default definition here which always returns true, i.e., declares any two chromosomes to be in-order.

Consider the specification for this class. Consider Fitness. Since different applications will likely provide quite different definitions for the associated get operation which, for ease of reference in the discussion, we will refer to as getFitness, it would seem that the framework-level specification of this method should impose no conditions on it. But there is one condition that does make sense: that it not change the chromosome in any way. In other words, the state of the chromosome after a call to this method should be the same as before the call:



In our post-conditions5, we use the @pre notation of OCL [18] to refer to the value of the particular variable at the time the method was invoked. So (1) tells us that self, the chromosome's state6, is the same when the method finishes as when it started. Indeed, one could argue that the get associated with any property of any class should meet a requirement such as (1). But it may be unwise to impose such a blanket requirement since there might be situations where it is appropriate for a get to change the state of the object. This requires further experience with the notion of properties. One possible compromise might be to require it at the level of the conceptual specification of the class but not at the level of the concrete model.

When we define getFitness in the application, we will have to show, as required by behavioral subtyping, that it satisfies (1). Thus, although in the framework we have not defined getFitness, its framework-level specification gives guidance to the application developer about the conditions that its definition in the application must satisfy if the framework is to function as intended.

Consider next the CrossOver() method. This too is abstract since the details of how we `crossover' or combine two parent chromosomes to arrive at two child chromosomes depends on the particular GA and hence will be defined in the application. But at the framework level we can specify some conditions that this method must necessarily satisfy:



The pre-condition requires that the argument c2 be the same type as the self object. The post-condition asserts that neither the self object nor c2 is modified, and that the (runtime) types of the two results returned are the same as that of self. The specifications of the other methods of Chromosome are similar and we omit them. In Section 3.3, we will see how the XML-documentation mechanism of C# can be used to generate documentation for frameworks, consisting of such specifications.

GAFController class

The GAFController class appears in Figure 3. This class, and in particular the RunGA() method, is the one that "drives" the entire application. Many frameworks have a similar structure. currPop contains the current population. gaRptr is used for producing reports at various points during the evolution. RunGA() invokes various methods of GAReporter at the start and end of the entire run, and at the start and end of each "generation". By redefining these methods in the application, these reports can be customized to the needs of the particular application. Our conceptual model of GAFController consists of a sequence of chromosomes to represent the current population and a conceptual reporter object which will be a sequence of reports.

Consider SelectParents(). This method, to be defined in the application, is used to choose "parents" from the current population. The parents may be chosen on the basis of fitness or other considerations, depending on the particular GA application. In the specification (3), cP denotes the sequence of chromosomes that is the current population and gAR denotes the reporter component of the conceptual model.



Figure 3: GAFController class



This asserts that SelectParents() does not change the GAFController object, and both chromosomes in the result are from the current population (" " denotes set membership). Note that this specification may be too strong. It would not allow the GA application developer to, for example, define this method to record, in gAR, information about the individuals selected as parents. We could allow this by weakening (3). The flip side of weakening the specs of the hook methods is that it would reduce the degree of reasoning reuse.

InitPopulation() is easily specified and we omit this spec. Next consider SetNewPopulation(). The default implementation simply sets currPop equal to cChildren. But more complex GAs are easy to imagine; for example, set the current population to be the union of some elements of currPop and some elements of cChildren, possibly based on the fitnesses of the individuals in question. Such behaviors are allowed by (4); indeed, (4) even allows us to introduce entirely new individuals that are not

in either cP@pre nor in childP, into the current population. If we want to forbid such behavior, we can do so by adding a clause such as

to this post-condition. This will ensure that each element that is in cP when this method finishes must have been in cP at the start of the method or in childP (or both).

Finally we turn to RunGA(). RunGA() works as follows: It first initializes the population. Then goes through nn iterations of "evolution". In each, it replaces the current population with a new population; it also uses appropriate methods of GAReporter to produce reports at the start and end of each generation.

In each iteration, RunGA() produces the new population as follows: Use SelectParents() to select parents; use Chromosome. CrossOver() to "cross-over" parents to generate two children; use Chromosome.Mutate() to possibly "mutate" the children; add the children to a temporary population, created at the start of the iteration; repeat until the number of children is the same as the count of the current population; at the end of the iteration, use SetNewPopulation(), with the temporary population just created, to obtain the "next generation".

As we saw in Section 2, in order to allow us, at the application-level, to arrive at RunGA()'s richer behavior resulting from the redefinitions of these hook methods in the application, RunGA()'s specification must provide information about these calls and about how cP and gAR will be modified on the basis of the results of these calls. We do this by specifying the tPost (for "template-post-condition") of this template method. Essentially, tPost.RunGA() gives us information not only about the final values of cP and gAR but also the calls to hook methods that RunGA() makes during its execution.

The first clause, (5.1), simply states that the population size is the same as at the start of RunGA. The rest of the specification is enclosed in angle brackets ("< >") to indicate that this part uses our `programmer-friendly' notation to specify information about calls to hook methods. The first line of this part states that the first two hook methods that RunGA() will invoke are initPopulation() and initRpt() respectively (the latter being on the object gAR ).

In the next line, we use a 'macro' notation. The macro NextGen() , specified in (5.3), captures the structure of hook method calls that RunGA() makes when going through one 'generation'. Thus (5.2) asserts that the calls to InitPopulation() and InitRpt() are followed by nn instances of the structure specified in the NextGen() macro, followed finally by the invocation of FinalRpt() (on gAR ). (5.3) gives us the structure of NextGen() : This consists of a call to BeginNewGenRpt(), followed by initialization of the `loop counter' k to the Count value of the current population (Count being a property of the ChromosomePopulation class that gives us the size of the population in question), followed by a sequence of k/2 instances of the following: invoke SelectParents(), invoke CrossOver() on the parent chromosomes returned by SelectParents() to get the children, invoke Mutate() on each child, then use AddChromosomes() to add these to the new generation; and finally invoke SetNewPop() to update the current population with the new generation, childPop.

Documentation

An important development [8] in the C# technology is the use of XML-documentation to provide useful information about the class; this information can consist of precise specifications of the class's methods. Further, while we can use the 'standard' tags, we can also define new ones in a style-sheet and use these in the documentation. If the proper 'tags' are defined in the style sheets, one of the output of the C# compiler, an XML document containing all the documentation associated with the class, can be run (in conjunction with the style sheets) through an appropriate browser to produce very readable and informative output. We have experimented with this in our GA framework. An example of the C# source code that includes this type of documentation appears in Figure 4.



Figure 4: Documentation of Chromosome Class: C# Source Code (partial listing)

This piece of documentation corresponds to the method Chromosome.CrossOver() and contains the information we saw in the specification of this method. We have used a number of different tags here which are all defined in the associated style sheets (we will not look at these style sheets here; they are available from the web site mentioned previously). The resulting HTML document, viewed on a standard browser, appears in Figure 5. Documentation corresponding to two members, CrossOver and Fitness, of the Chromosome class are shown in this figure. The contract portions of the documentation for these two members are identical to what we saw earlier.

One point is worth noting concerning this type of documentation. It assumes that we have access to the source code of the classes in question,Chromosome class. Indeed, what we have in Fig. 4 is part of the source code of that class. Clearly, such an approach will not work if we are interested in documenting classes for which we do not have the source with precise contracts. We will return to this question in the final section.


4 GA APPLICATIONS

The GA literature [5,14,15] provides numerous examples of genetic algorithms of varying complexities over many different domains. In this section, we will briefly discuss one of these GAs that we have implemented as an application on top of the framework presented in the last section. We also briefly discuss the behavioral aspects of these applications.

Even GA

Our application is adapted from a GA presented in [15]. Here each chromosome is a string of ten bits, i.e., a chromosome is an unsigned, ten-digit binary integer. The goal of the GA is to `evolve' from an initial population of a random collection of twenty such integers to a population of `high fitness' individuals, where fitness is measured by the number of 1's in the integer, with even integers being fitter than odd integers.


Figure 5: Documentation of Chromosome class: The browser view


To build a new application, we have to define the appropriate derived classes of Chromosome and GAFController. These derived classes, for EvenGA, appear in Figures 6 and 7. EvenChromosome is straightforward. EvenGAFController uses a variable lastIndex to remember the most recently chosen chromosome. SelectParents() chooses two chromosomes with the probability of each chromosome being chosen being proportional to its fitness, and uses lastIndex to go through the chromosomes in a round-robin manner. Main() simply creates a GAReporter object, an EvenGAFController object eGAF, and then applies RunGA() (of GAFController) to it, passing 1000 as the argument to RunGA(), as the required number of generations of evolution. RunGA(), as we saw, will initialize the population (using the InitPopulation() defined in EvenChromosome), and go through the specified number of generations, using the SelectParents(), CrossOver(), and Mutate() operations defined in Figure 6 to evolve the population from one generation to the next.


Figure 6: EvenChromosome



Figure 7: EvenGAFController

Note the power of the framework-based approach. In implementing EvenGA, all we had to do was specify how fitness of a chromosome is evaluated, how it is mutated, how a pair of parents is 'crossed' to get a pair of children, and how parents are selected. Everything else is defined in our framework and reused in the application. Admittedly, this is a simple application but more complex GAs are built in the same fashion.

Now consider the behavior of EvenGA. First, we must check that the behavioral subtyping requirements are met; for example, that the methods defined in EvenChromosome satisfy the specifications of the corresponding methods of Chromosome. We first define the conceptual model of EvenChromosome. This is essentially the same as its concrete model: a sequence of 10 bits with the values as in chrDNA[].The specification (1) of Chromosome.getFitness was:

post.getFitness(self =self@pre)

To show that EvenChromosome.getFitness satisfies this, we just need to check that its code does not modify chrDNA[]. Similarly, Mutate() and CrossOver() of EvenChromosome can be shown to satisfy the requirements of behavioral subtyping.

The conceptual model of GAFController was a sequence of chromosomes, plus a reporter object. For EvenGAFController, the chromosomes must be EvenChromosomes. In addition, the model includes lIndex, an integer whose value is the index of the (second) even chromosome chosen by the most recent SelectParents() operation (and - 1 at the start). The mapping to the base class model simply omits the lIndex component. With this, it is easy to check that SelectParents() and InitPopulation() as defined in EvenGAFController do satisfy their base-class specs. Hence the template method RunGA() will continue to satisfy its framework-level specification.

Now consider the enriched behavior of RunGA(). First we need to consider the richer behavior of the hook methods. One important point is that by the very nature of genetic algorithms, many of the important functions are probabilistic, and this is true of many of the (hook) methods defined in EvenGA. But standard ways of reasoning about programs do not cater to probabilistic considerations. Standard DBC contracts can of course specify that a particular method can produce many different results (for a given initial state and argument values) but there is no standard way for associating probabilities with the various possible results. Consider the behavior of the EvenGA.SelectParents(). From the description in Fig. 6 of this method, it is clear that the method may return any two individuals from the current population as the selected parents; and it would be easy to specify this (indeed, this is already expressed in the framework-level specification (3) of the method). Clearly this is inadequate. The key intuition behind methods such as EvenGAFController.SelectParents() is as follows: preferring parents with higher fitnesses but also allowing, with a lower probability, individuals with lower fitness to be chosen, in conjunction with random mutations, again with very low probability, allows the system to evolve, with high probability, a population of high fitness individuals. This is clearly not the same as random selection of parents and random mutations of individuals, which is what specifications such as (3) express.

One solution would be to extend the specifications of methods to allow us to associate specific probabilities with various results that the method may lead to. This would be important even in the case of EvenGA.Mutate(): as indicated in Fig. 6, this operation leaves the chromosome unchanged with a 99% probability. Consider the following specification:

This asserts that there is a 99% probability that the chromosome state will be the same as at the start of the operation; and that there is a 1% probability that the state at the end of the operation will differ from the state at the start by 1 bit. Developing ways to reason about probabilistic behavior will, we believe, become increasingly important as such algorithms are more widely used.

Once we have suitable specifications for SelectParents(), Mutate() and other hook methods defined in EvenGA, we can proceed to 'plug' them into the tPost-condition (5) of RunGA(). (5) tells us that in each generation, RunGA() calls SelectParents() and then applies CrossOver() to the results returned by SelectParents() to generate the children on which the Mutate() operation is applied and the resulting children added to the child generation; etc. This should let us conclude, given appropriate specifications such as (6), that when EvenGA.RunGA() finishes, the average fitness of the individuals in the final population will have a range of possible values, with the higher values having higher probabilities.

The above explanation of how we arrive at the richer behavior of the template method is admittedly informal. In [17], we have proposed a set of formal rules that can be applied to formalize this task. But the formalism of [17] requires the specification of the template method to be in a standard form, not in the programming language-like notation that we have used to specify runGA(). Moreover, that formalism does not cater to probabilistic specifications of the type we have proposed above. These are problems for future work.


5 DISCUSSION

The goals of our work were three-fold. First, as a case study of the framework-based approach, to apply the approach to capture the common aspects of genetic algorithms into a framework, so that when a new GA is implemented we can build it as an application on top of the framework rather than starting from scratch or trying to modify an existing GA by cutting-and-pasting portions of the code. The framework we designed and implemented seems to serve this purpose well. We have been able to implement different GAs on top of our framework in a natural fashion.

Our second goal was to explore the issues involved in reasoning about OO frameworks and applications built on them. The key question was whether we could achieve the same kind of reuse in the reasoning effort as the framework-based approach allows us to achieve in the implementation effort. There were two important issues here: First, we had to make sure that hook methods defined or redefined in the application satisfy their framework-level specifications; this is handled by the requirement of behavioral subtyping [11]. Second, at the framework level we had to provide a richer specification for template methods than is possible using standard post-conditions; in particular, we had to include information about the hook methods that the template method in question calls, and how it uses the results of such calls, etc. We did this by using a programming-language like notation to specify this additional information. Given such a richer specification of the template method, we could, at the application level, plug-in the behavior of the hook methods as defined at the application level, to arrive at the application-level behavior of the template method without reanalyzing its code. Our third goal was to use the documentation facilities of C# to generate documentation precisely specifying our framework as well as the applications built using it. We believe that the results, such as the fragment shown in Fig. 5, demonstrate the importance and usefulness of such facilities especially in the case of frameworks.

Let us now consider the possibility of adding such specifications to classes or frameworks that we might purchase, in compiled form (only), from a software vendor. Meyer [13] mentions a contract wizard that exploits the meta-data information that the C#/.NET framework provides to allow us to add class invariants and pre- and post-conditions to existing classes whose source code may not be available. This is very important because information about key methods such as RunGA() tends to be provided only informally; and frameworks are often supplied only in compiled form. If the contract wizard can be used to handle the `programmer-friendly' specifications such as (5), we will be able to use it as follows: first convert, by hand, the informal documentation into precise specifications; next, use the contract wizard to add these specifications to the framework. We intend to investigate the possibility of using the contract wizard to deal with specifications such as (5).

We will conclude with a comment about our specification notation. Although the notation used in (5) for specifying the template methods is programming-language-like, these are specifications, not programs. In particular, they do not give us any information about how the method manipulates its local variables, etc. In future work, we plan to define this notation more precisely and to also make more precise the somewhat informal technique we used in the last section for going from the framework-level specification of a template method expressed in this notation to its application-specific behavior.



Footnotes

1 We use the standard notation C.h() to refer to the method h() defined in C. Similarly D.h() will refer to the h() defined in the derived class D.

2 In some cases the framework code may not even be available as for example in the case of a framework that was purchased from a software vendor.

3 Due to space limitations, here we will only discuss select portions of our framework and one of the applications we have built using it. Full details, including the complete C# code and documentation are available from http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/

4 In our presentation in this paper, we do not always strictly abide by the style guidelines[1] of C#, mostly in the interest of reducing white-space; thus we typically do not put a single "{" on a line by itself, preferring instead to move it to the end of the previous line. In the code that is on the web site, we do obey the guidelines.

5 We usually omit pre-conditions if, as in this case, they are trivial, i.e., true .

6 self is the Smalltalk term for the 'current' object; it is the same as this in C# but self seems more descriptive so we use that.




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About the authors

Jason Hallstrom is a graduate student in the Computer and Information Science Dept. at the Ohio State University. Jason is interested in various aspects of Software Engineering; his Ph.D. work deals with developing techniques and tools for building large systems in a flexible and reliable manner.

Neelam Soundarajan is an Associate Professor in the Computer and Information Science Dept. at the Ohio State University. His primary interests are in Software Engineering, specifically in reasoning about program behavior.



Cite this article as follows: Jason Hallstrom, Neelam Soundarajan: "Incremental Development Using Object Oriented Frameworks: A Case Study", in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 1, no. 3, special issue: TOOLS USA 2002 proceedings, pages 189-205. http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2002_08/article11