Tool interfaces for software development: models, experiments and evaluation

For the last decade, research into integrated software development environments has been one of the focuses in the software engineering community. The key objective of this paper is to classify the existing tool interfacing/integration models for software development. They are termed the uncoupled, tightly-coupled, and loosely-coupled paradigms. Our experiments with these paradigms are also briefly described so as to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each paradigm. Based on this paper a clear view of tool interfaces for software development is presented