Software development involves the use of many models and Eclipse provides an ideal infrastructure for building tools to support the use of models. While there is a large selection of tools available for working with individual models, there is less support for working with collections of models, as for example, when a collection of models from different sources must be merged. We have identified the problem of working with collections of related models in software development as the Software Model Management (SMM) problem -a close cousin of the Model Management problem in the area of metadata management. In the course of building SMM tools to address particular scenarios, we have observed that they share common foundations both at the theoretical and implementation levels. In this paper, we describe the vision and initial development of a framework that implements these common foundations in order to facilitate and accelerate the development of Eclipse-based SMM tools.

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When performing software change tasks, software developers spend a substantial amount of their time navigating dependencies in the code. Despite the availability of numerous tools to aid such navigation, there is evidence to suggest that developers are not using these tools. In this paper, we introduce an active help system, called Spyglass, that suggests tools to aid program navigation as a developer works. We report on the results of a laboratory study that investigated two questions: will developers act upon suggestions from an active help system and will those suggestions improve developer behaviour? We found that with Spyglass we could make developers as aware of navigational tools as they are when requested to read a tutorial about such tools, with less up-front effort. We also found that we could improve developer behaviour as developers in the Spyglass group, after being given recommendations in the context of their work, navigated programming artifacts more efficiently than those in the tutorial group.

To help software developers work efficiently, integrated development environments (IDE) include many tools. All too often, these developers are unaware of potentially useful tools within these IDEs that might help them complete their work more effectively. To improve both awareness and use of tools within an IDE, we have been developing a recommendation system called Spyglass that recommends tool(s) that might help a developer navigate information available in an IDE more efficiently. When designing such a recommendation system, important considerations are both the content of the recommendations and the form and manner in which those recommendations are made. In this paper, we focus on what we learned about the form and manner of making tool recommendations from a longitudinal user study of Spyglass. These results may be useful to others designing various kinds of recommendation systems for IDEs.

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