Abstract
Modern integrated development environments (IDE) such as Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse, and languages, such as Java and .Net, represent a far step ahead from the legacy development environments such as grep and Emacs. One would assume that the productivity of programmers has been dramatically improved. To get a more realistic assessment of improvements, after more than ten years on an investigation on programmer productivity, we recently embarked into an investigation of a group of programmers in a software company using all the modern features of Visual Studio. We found that indeed there were significant improvements. But, at the same time, other side effects made the overall improvement not so clear. The complexity of the development environment and its associated libraries and ready-made components represent a significant new source of loss of productivity that manifests the most in the cost of debugging and learning. A better understanding of the challenges associated with adopting new development technologies may rescue some of the gain in productivity. Index Terms—IDE, Productivity, empirical software engineering.
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