From a development point of view, a framework has to be general enough to be useful, but it has to be precise enough to be programmable and to have reasonable performance. From a reuse point of view, we have to document frameworks succinctly, unambiguously, and understandably. The components of the framework should be searchable. In the process of documentation, there are issues related to representing the existing frameworks, their inter-object behaviors, their usages, scalability, extensibility, and searchability [6].

Accurate and comprehensible documentation is crucial to the success of large-scale frameworks. Documenting frameworks must describe the purpose of the framework, how to use the framework, and the detailed design of the framework. The design of the framework fixes certain roles and responsibilities amongst the classes, as well as standard protocols for their collaboration. The variability within the family of applications is factored into hot spots. The framework provides simple mechanisms to customize each hot spot. The documentation should document both general and specific functionalities.

Documenting frameworks is a costly activity and contemporary tools often focus on low-level method-oriented documentation, which fails to capture the strategic roles and collaborations among framework components. With the advent of tools for reverse-engineering the structure of classes and objects in complex frameworks, accuracy and utility of framework documentation will be improved. An increase in the current trend of using design patterns will provide higher-level descriptions of frameworks.

Generally, traditional framework documentation just provides static views of a framework. The static views are very important to understand the basic structures and general functionalities of the frameworks, but it is not enough to represent the whole framework. The run-time architecture of a framework is characterized by an inversion of control. Sometimes, documenting the dynamic side of a framework is more important for framework reuse. Each framework has control flow among the various methods of the framework's classes. Documenting framework behaviors is very critical for application developers to understand the whole structure of the framework. Documenting dynamic views of a framework is more difficult than documenting static views, and it requires more advanced techniques.