Eclipseye - spying on eclipse

Software evolution analysis permits developers and researchers to analyze software sys-tems. It allows seeing the trends that the development of software has, with its present state and predict its future. Today, researchers use the repositories of versioning systems to extract the history of a software, by downloading several versions of a system and then analyzing it. The problem with this approach is that versioning systems do not store all the important details of the development process of software, such as the changes that occur between two successive versions. When developing software, programmers use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). IDEs make the life of developers easier, by providing automated or semi-automated tools (e.g. refactoring actions). In order to gather accurate information about the de-velopment process of a software system, a change-based system can be built, which integrates within the IDE the developer is using. We can record relevant events gener-ated in the IDE and process them incrementally. The events we are mainly interested in are class addition, modification and removal, method addition, modification and re-moval, refactoring actions, etc. We implemented a plugin, called EclipsEye, for the Eclipse IDE, and more specifically for the Java programming language. By implementing it we were able to validate the applicability of the change-based approach and the plugin itself. For case studies we installed the plugin on our own Eclipse and we monitored the development of the visu-alization part. Furthermore we asked some of the second semester university students to install it as well, since they were doing a Java project using Eclipse.