PECAN: Program Development Systems that Support Multiple Views
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
TuringTool: A User Interface to Aid in the Software Maintenance Task
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code
Functional Paleontology: The Evolution of User-Visible System Services
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Studying the Evolution and Enhancement of Software Features
ICSM '00 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'00)
Evolution in Open Source Software: A Case Study
ICSM '00 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'00)
How Are Java Software Developers Using the Eclipse IDE?
IEEE Software
Studying the evolution of the Eclipse Java editor
Proceedings of the 2007 OOPSLA workshop on eclipse technology eXchange
On the ease and efficiency of human-computer interfaces
Proceedings of the 2008 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications
An empirical study of the design and implementation of object equality in Java
CASCON '08 Proceedings of the 2008 conference of the center for advanced studies on collaborative research: meeting of minds
Automated programmering: the programmer's assistant
AFIPS '72 (Fall, part II) Proceedings of the December 5-7, 1972, fall joint computer conference, part II
Improving API documentation usability with knowledge pushing
ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
A model of large program development
IBM Systems Journal
Building semantic editors using JastAdd: tool demonstration
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools and Applications
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Programmers spend much of their time interacting with Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), which help increase productivity by automating much of the clerical and administrative work. Like any useful software, IDEs are becoming more powerful and usable as new functionality is added and usability concerns addressed. In particular, the last decade has witnessed the rapid and steady growth of features and enhancements (changes) in major Java IDEs. It is of research interest to learn about the characteristics of these changes as well as salient patterns in their evolution trajectories as these can be useful to understand and guide both the design and evolution of similar systems. To this end, a total of 645 "What's New" entries in seven releases of the Eclipse IDE were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively under two models. Using the first, an activity-based, functional model, it is found that the vast majority of the changes are refinements or incremental additions to the feature architecture set up in early releases (1.0 and 2.0). Using the second, a usability-based model, a detailed usability analysis was performed to further characterize these changes in terms of their potential impact on how effectively programmers use the IDE. Findings and implications as well as results of selective comparison with two other popular IDEs are reported.