This was the first Eclipse Day Delft - A Summary

Last week, the first Eclipse Day Delft has taken place. With eleven fabulous speakers and more than 60 participants this day was a great success.

Erik Meijer opened the day by showing the participants how to program a teapot visualization in HTML, and inviting all to re-implement this in their favorite programming language.

The first session was started by Patriek van Dorp, who showed with a live-demo how Eclipse can be used to deploy Java to the Microsoft Cloud. After that, Marcel Bruch presented the helpful Eclipse Code Recommender tool, which can predict which code statement you are (likely) going to type next. The final talk in this session was given by Pupier Aurelien, who showed how the power of GMF can be leveraged.

After a very communicative coffee break, Koen Aers took over the stage and showed how the Forge command-line tool can be integrated in Eclipse. Afterward, I presented the results of the Eclipse Study on how Eclipse-based products are tested, with the title "Test Confessions".

After the lunch break, Sven Efftinge showed how Xtext allows to reuse and integrate all kinds of Java language constructs right in your language, by demonstrating one of the seven languages based on Xtext. Then, Matthias Kempka explained the recipe for successful Eclipse-based products, and Werner Keil talked about continuous delivery.

The last session focused on model driven development, and was kick-started by Martin Taal, who showed how EMFT Texo can bring modeling to the mobile web. Subsequently, Ed Merks outline how modeling for programmers and programming for modelers works with Xcore.

Finally, there was time to network and talk while enjoying some drinks and snacks. Organizing this event was a great experience and adventure, and I enjoyed it very much. All slides of the talks are online. You can find more pictures of the event here.

Test Confessions: A Study of Testing Practices for Plug-In Systems (ICSE 2012)

A study by M. Greiler, A. van Deursen and M. Storey.

Testing component-based systems in general, and plug-in based products in particular, is a daunting task; the myriad of plug-in combinations, versions, interactions, and configurations gives rise to a combinatorial explosion of possibilities. Yet in practice, the systems assembled from plug-ins are widely used, achieving levels of reliability that permit successful adoption.

So which test techniques are used to ensure plug-in based products have adequate quality levels? How is the combinatorial explosion tackled? Are plug-in specific integration testing techniques adopted?

Answering questions like these calls for an in-depth study of test practices in a community of people working on plug-in based applications. To that end, we conducted a qualitative study, in which we interviewed 25 senior practitioners about how they test plug-ins and applications built on top of the Eclipse plug-in framework, and challenged the results by a structured survey of more than 150 professionals. The outcome is an overview of the testing practices currently used, a set of identified barriers limiting the adoption of test practices, and an explanation of how limited testing is compensated, which we will present on Wednesday June 6 2:00pm at ICSE 2012.

In summary, the study reveals a strong focus on unit testing, while the plug-in specific testing challenges and practices are tackled in an ad-hoc and manual manner. This lack in plug-in specific integration testing is due to several barriers, such as unclear responsibilities for system integration, a lack in resources and knowledge about plug-in testing, long test execution times and many more. This lack of explicit testing beyond the unit scope is compensated for by self-hosting of projects, the process whereby the software developed in a project is used internally on a regular basis, and the involvement of the community.

Based on these findings, we believe that to leverage plug-in specific testing, and facilitate test automation, plug-in specific tool support is needed. For the research community, we see the need to revisit current test strategies and techniques with respect to plug-in specific testing needs. For the developer community, we recommend to make the role of the community more explicit, e.g. by rewarding community members or by dedicated test days.

We hope to see you all on Wednesday @ ICSE 2012. Slides are now online:

ICSE 2012: Test Confessions - A study of testing practices for plug-in systems

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