Capturing and Exploiting IDE Interactions

Abstract

Integrated development environments (IDEs) dominate the production and maintenance of software. Developers interact intensively with their IDEs while working. These interactions reflect a developer's thought process and work habits. By capturing and exploiting comprehensive, fine-grained IDE interactions, we can build intelligent IDEs that improve programmer productivity. This next generation of IDEs will incorporate a general framework to capture and exploit IDE interactions, and create an ecosystem of developer-aware applications and plugins. IDE++ realizes this framework on top of the popular Eclipse IDE and can be downloaded from the Eclipse marketplace. To demonstrate IDE++'s comprehensive and granular capture of interactions, we capture, then faithfully replay, a developer's IDE actions on six nontrivial programming tasks. We built four applications upon IDE++ to illustrate 1) the need for capturing comprehensive, fine-grained IDE interactions, and 2) the promise of developer-aware IDEs.