Exploiting Dynamic Information in IDEs Eases Software Maintenance

The integrated development environment (IDE) is the primary tool used by developers to maintain software systems. The IDE, however, narrowly focuses on the static structure of a system, neglecting dynamic behavior and dynamic relationships between static source artifacts such as classes and methods. Developers often have difficulties to understand the dynamic aspects of a system just based on the static source perspectives provided by IDEs. Existing IDE tools to analyze the running of software systems such as debuggers or profilers present volatile dynamic information from specific system executions, requiring developers to manually trigger debugging or profiling sessions. To better support the understanding and maintenance of software systems, we developed several extensions to traditional IDEs to incorporate dynamic information in the static source perspectives. In this paper we describe these extensions and report on the empirical experiments we conducted to evaluate the practical usefulness of these IDE extensions.