How to Catch ’Em All: WatchDog, a Family of IDE Plug-Ins to Assess Testing

by Beller, Moritz and Levaja, Igor and Panichella, Annibale and Gousios, Georgios and Zaidman, Andy

You can get a pre-print version from here.

Abstract

As software engineering researchers, we are also zealous tool smiths. Building a research prototype is often a daunting task, let alone building a industry-grade family of tools supporting multiple platforms to ensure the generalizability of our 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, WatchDog, provides real-time and aggregated feedback in the form of individual testing reports.

Bibtex record

@inproceedigns{BLPGZ16,
  author = {Beller, Moritz and Levaja, Igor and Panichella, Annibale and Gousios, Georgios and Zaidman, Andy},
  title = {How to Catch ’Em All: WatchDog, a Family of IDE Plug-Ins to Assess Testing},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice},
  year = {2016},
  url = {/pub/how-to-catchem-all.pdf}
}