The Evolution of Eclipse

Mens, Tom; Fernández-Ramil, Juan and Degrandsart, Sylvain (2008). The Evolution of Eclipse. In: International Conference on Software Maintenance, ICSM 2008, 28 Sep - 4 Oct 2008, Beijing, China.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2008.4658087

Abstract

We present a metrics-based study of the evolution of Eclipse, an open source integrated development environment, based on data from seven major releases, from releases 1.0 to 3.3. We investigated whether three of the laws of software evolution were supported by the data. We found that Eclipse displayed continual change and growth, hence supporting laws 1 and 6. Six size indicators, out of eight, closely followed trend models. Four were linear and two superlinear. We found evidence of increasing complexity (law 2) in only two indicators, out of five. At subproject level, size and complexity are not distributed uniformly, and subproject size can be modelled as a negative exponential function of the rank position. We encountered a range of different size and complexity trends across subprojects. Our approach and results can help in evaluating the future evolution of Eclipse, the evolution of other systems and in performing comparisons.

Viewing alternatives

Metrics

Item Actions

Export

You can export this page using these formats Digital Object Identifier - DOI

About

• Item ORO ID
• 27316
• Item Type
• Conference or Workshop Item
• Project Funding Details

• Funded Project Name	Project ID	Funding Body
  Not Set	Not Set	Belgian FRS-FNRS posdoctoral scholarship 2.4519.05

• Extra Information
• Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.
• Keywords
• software evolution; empirical studies; metrics; complexity; Lehman's laws; Eclipse; integrated development environments
• Academic Unit or School
• Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) > Computing and Communications
  Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)
• Research Group
• Centre for Research in Computing (CRC)
• Copyright Holders
• © 2008 IEEE
• Related URLs
• • http://www.icsm2008.org/(Other)
• Depositing User
• Juan Fernandez-Ramil