[pde-core-dev] Testability experiment

[Magiel Bruntink <magiel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Eclipse developers,

Currently I am researching into the topic of software testability as part of
my master's project. In order to validate some theoretical results, I'de like
to perform an experiment. If you can spare some of your time,
your participation in this experiment will be greatly appreciated.

First let me explain a few things about my research. The topic of my thesis
is testability of software, but for now the focus is on object-oriented software,
and more specifically Java. I am examining if there is some relation between
source-based metrics and effort required to test the components of a system.

The experiment consists of the following: I have selected a number of classes
of a specific Eclipse sub-project (of the 2.1 release branch). These classes
are listed below, in no particular order. I would like to ask you the following:
Rank the classes in ascending order of effort that you think would be needed to
develop a test suite for each particular class.

It is important to keep in mind that a major factor of effort estimation is the
availability of tools (f.e. JUnit) and the organization of the project. For this
reason I'de like you to take the Eclipse project and its available tools as a
starting point for your estimates.

Many thanks in advance!

Magiel Bruntink,
magiel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
mbruntnk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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selected classes for the pde-core subproject:

org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.AbstractModel
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.PDERegistryCacheReader
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.build.BuildEntry
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.feature.Feature
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.feature.FeatureImport
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.plugin.ExternalPluginModelBase
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.plugin.XEErrorHandler
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.plugin.XEParseException
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.plugin.XMLCore
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.plugin.XMLDocumentModelBuilder
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.schema.Schema
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.search.PluginSearchOperation
org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.site.SiteCategory