Eclipse Quality Assessment

Eclipse is growing in popularity as a software platform, but designing for Eclipse is different than designing plain Java applications. Design quality is essential for maintainability and long term stability. EclipseSource's Eclipse Design Meister highlights flaws in your Eclipse design and suggests ways to improve Eclipse applications. EclipseSource draws on its expertise with Eclipse and the output of the Eclipse Design Meister tool to offer customers the Quality Assessment coaching with the goal of improving your application’s design.

The Story

Imagine that you have a large project implemented on top of Eclipse. At the beginning, adding new features was easy and straightforward. Now, however, while some new features are still easy, others require far more work than expected. A change in one place requires changes in several others, each of which requires yet further changes.

EclipseSource's Quality Assessment is intended for just such situations. In an Eclipse Quality Assessment, your existing design is inspected using Innoopract’s Eclipse Design Meister (EDM), an automated tool that spots opportunities to improve the design of Eclipse applications. Based on the resulting report, you begin to improve the parts of the design most in need of attention. At the same time, you learn how best to take advantage of Eclipse. After a short time, your design is already better – more flexible, easier to understand, and more modular.

About Design

Below are some reasons why an Eclipse Quality Assessment might help you in your project:

• The skills and knowledge to design a good Eclipse application are different from those required to design a generic Java application.
  
  
• More and more companies are choosing to build their software products on top of the technologies from Eclipse.org.  As these products interact and merge, a common set of design principles is vital to the applications’ stability.
  
  
• The quality of software directly impacts the cost of maintenance. This includes both changing existing functionality and adding new functionality.
  
  
• The design styles of plain Java and Eclipse don’t always fit together. Without adopting an Eclipse-like design style, Eclipse becomes more and more of an obstacle.

Measurements & Interface Design

Quality Measurements

EDM assumes that the basic unit of modularity is the plug-in and analyzes the relationships between plug-ins. It highlights opportunities to improve communication between plug-ins to reduce the chance of design changes that can ripple across plug-in boundaries. The EDM focuses on design improvements that will yield the greatest payoff and help you learn how to how make more effective use of Eclipse. The goal is for clients to write better Eclipse applications that have are stable in the long-term with minimal maintenance.

Inter-plug-in Interface Design

EDM provides a set of quantitative metrics to complement the binary warnings outlined above. Well-designed plug-ins tend to cluster in certain ranges of these measures. Your assessor will use the quantitative metrics to identify areas where you can use more of Eclipse’s support.

Benefits in Summary

When using Eclipse you'll achieve your goals significantly faster provided you adhere to the Eclipse guidelines. Get a comprehensive overview of the design of your platforms. Our experts will evaluate how to optimize Eclipse adoption in your company.