An Eclipse Plug-in: Dependency Browser

Dependency search is an important tactic in many software activities, particularly during software maintenance. Eclipse has a few powerful tools to support such activity but they can be more convenient for programmers to use. In this paper, we proposed a light-weight and agile Eclipse plug-in: Dependency Browser, which parses call dependencies and presents them with a user- friendly interface which automatically reacts to some specific programmers´ actions. We tested Dependency Browser on four open-source applications to check the usability, speed and memory usage. The test result demonstrated that our new Eclipse plug-in is convenient to use, fast to run, and has high precision. Therefore, the Dependency Browser could be further developed into a useful commercial tool and help programmer to conduct software maintenance tasks.