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ABSTRACT

In evolutionary software development, knowing how design evolves with features can be valuable in guiding future projects. It helps answer questions like "How much upfront design should and can be done?" and "How and why are designs changed?" To shed light on these questions, we report on a study of the evolution history of the Eclipse Java editor. We find that the MVC-based design was cleanly laid out in the beginning of the project and carefully followed and maintained, which has contributed positively to the continuous growth of the editor features. Although design changes at the individual feature level happened for reasons like extensibility and reusability, they appear to be local and manageable. The AST facility is a key service that enables more than one half of the Java editor features.

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