Margaret-Anne D. Storey, Jody Ryall, R. Ian Bull, Del Myers, Janice Singer. TODO or to bug: exploring how task annotations play a role in the work practices of software developers. In Wilhelm Schäfer, Matthew B. Dwyer, Volker Gruhn, editors, 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Leipzig, Germany, May 10-18, 2008. pages 251-260, ACM, 2008. [doi]
Eclipse is a leading development environment that provides a rich set of features supporting Java development. However, little data is available about its usage. Usage data from 41 developers using Java and Eclipse shows that they’re using advanced features such as refactoring and are extending the environment using third-party tools. However, they rarely use some of the other features, such as bookmarking places in the code. The article also includes briefly describes the authors’ Eclipse-based open-source analysis framework. Open-source projects such as Eclipse should be gathering and analyzing more usage data to ensure the tools they’re building evolve to meet user communities’ needs.