LSP method and its use for evaluation of Java IDEs

In this paper we propose a quantitative model for evaluation and selection of integrated development environments (IDEs) for Java enterprise applications. Our goal is to determine the extent to which major IDEs satisfy typical software developer requirements. Our evaluation model is based on the Logic Scoring of Preference (LSP) method for system evaluation. We present an overview of the LSP method, the structure of IDE evaluation criterion, and a sample evaluation and comparison of three competitive systems: IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer, Borland JBuilder, and SUN ONE Studio. In this paper we also introduce rectangular diagrams, an efficient new notation of LSP criteria.