How to catch 'em all

Abstract

As software engineering researchers, we are also zealous tool smiths. Building a research prototype is often a daunting task, let alone building an industry-grade family of tools supporting multiple platforms to ensure the generalizability of results. In this paper, we give advice to academic and industrial tool smiths on how to design and build an easy-to-maintain architecture capable of supporting multiple integrated development environments (IDEs). Our experiences stem from WatchDog, a multi-IDE infrastructure that assesses developer testing activities in vivo and that over 2,000 registered developers use. To these software engineering practitioners, Watch-Dog provides real-time and aggregated feedback in the form of individual testing reports.