IEEE Software Special Issue: Development Tools

Summary

Software development tools have become an indispensable part of the modern software development process. They are required to manage software complexity, global team coordination, legacy software maintainance, software migration, agile software development, localization, etc. Such tools address virtually all aspects of the software development lifecycle and are used to

• improve the quality of produced software (e.g. profilers, automated test environments,

bug finders, debuggers, etc.)

• automate the software production process (e.g. compilers, program generators,

GUI creation tools, wizards, etc.)

• ease the process of producing code (e.g. intelissense editors and sophisticated IDEs)
• increase the reliability and maintainabilty of software under construction

(e.g. version control systems, continuous build integration, reproducible night builds, etc.)

• improve communication inside development teams (e.g. requirement, feature, and bug tracking; WIKI's)
• improve customer communication and feedback (e.g. customer issue management and handling)
• manage and synchronise documentation (e.g. documentation generators)
• track quality changes over the development lifecycle (e.g. automated performance measurements)
• improve the ability to maintain released products (e.g. lifecycle management tools, remote debugging)
• etc.

The special issue on "software development infrastructure" sollicits papers, which describe how tools can generally improve the software development lifecycle process. Articles may address specific trends; compare existing tools and approaches; or provide an in-depth analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of a particular tool. Articles should be backed by working software or emperical evidence.

Co-editors

• Diomidis Spinellis
• Simon Helsen
• Microsoft guy?

Interesting tools

• JMX
• FindBugs
• JAZZ (see [1])