Evaluation of integrated software development environments: Challenges and results from three empirical studies

Evidence shows that integrated development environments (IDEs) are too often functionality-oriented and difficult to use, learn, and master. This article describes challenges in the design of usable IDEs and in the evaluation of the usability of such tools. It also presents the results of three different empirical studies of IDE usability. Different methods are sequentially applied across the empirical studies in order to identify increasingly specific kinds of usability problems that developers face in their use of IDEs. The results of these studies suggest several problems in IDE user interfaces with the representation of functionalities and artifacts, such as reusable program components. We conclude by making recommendations for the design of IDE user interfaces with better affordances, which may ameliorate some of most serious usability problems and help to create more human-centric software development environments.