Object-oriented frameworks are currently regarded as a promising technology for reusing designs and implementations. However, developers find there is still a steep learning curve when extracting the design rationale and understanding the framework documentation during framework instantiation. Thus, instantiation is a costly process in terms of time, people, and other resources. These problems raise a number of questions including: "How can we raise the level of abstraction in which the framework instantiation is expressed, reasoned about and implemented?" "How can the same high-level design abstractions that were used to develop the framework be used during framework instantiation instead of using source code as is done currently?" "How can we define extended design abstractions that can allow framework instantiation to be explicitly represented and validated?" We present an approach to framework instantiation based on software processes that addresses these issues. Our main goal is to represent the framework design models in an explicit and declarative way, and support changes to this design based on explicit instantiation tasks based on software processes while maintaining system integrity, invariants, and general constraints. In this way, the framework instantiation can be performed in a valid and controlled way.

The consistency problems in UML models and related software processes can be very complex. First, although UML supports a modeling process that should yield inter and intraconsistent models, the meaning of the UML dependencies and their specializations is not precisely defined and, for this reason, many inconsistencies may appear in their models and processes. Precise definitions would form a basis for methods to detect and analyze consistency problems related to UML dependencies and relationships, as well as problems related to software processes described in UML. In addition, we are using the UML object constraint language (OCL) to describe constraints related to the framework instantiation process. OCL is recognized as a limited language in some aspects for expressing well-formedness rules. We have presented a method (T.C. Oliveira et al., 2004) that works in the case of consistent rules and consistent instantiation processes.