Tools of the trade : Tool Building on the Shoulders of Others

Software engineering requires adequate tool support. Software engineering research is no different. Many researchers in this field build and use advanced tools and prototypes to either validate their own research ideas or advance the state-of-the-art in software engineering tools and techniques. The 2008 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming introduced the International Workshop on Advanced Software Development Tools and Techniques, the first workshop dedicated to academic tool building. At that workshop, researchers shared their experiences and discussed how to build tools more effectively and efficiently. The 15 tools we looked at covered a broad range of topics, including refactoring, modeling, behavioral specification, static and dynamic program checking, user interface composition, and program understanding. In this column, we identify four emerging trends in academic tool development