An Exploratory Case Study in Designing and Implementing Tight Versus Loose Frameworks

Abstract

Frameworks provide large scale reuse by providing skeleton structure of similar applications. But the generality, that a framework may have, makes it fairly complex, hard to understand and thus to reuse. Frameworks have been classified according to many criteria. This paper proposes two types of framework (based on the concept of ‘generality’) named as: tight framework and loose framework. A case study is done by developing loose and tight frameworks for the appli-cation sets of Environment for Unit testing (EUT) domain. Based on the experience that we got by during this case study, we tried to find out the benefits of one (tight or loose) framework over the other. This work attempts to provide an initial background for meaningful studies related to the concept of ‘Design and Development of Framework’.