Study of novice programmers using Eclipse and Gild

In this paper we discuss a pilot user study that compares the use of two integrated development environments (IDEs), Eclipse and Gild, by novice programmers. Gild is a perspective for Eclipse that is intended to be more suitable for first-year students who are learning how to program in Java. This study focuses on qualitative and quantitative measures; the quantitative measures include: efficiency, effectiveness, satisfaction and understanding. Two statistically significant results are obtained from the satisfaction measure, in particular: the frustration level and the overall level of satisfaction. The mean differences for the remaining measures indicate that Gild was more suitable for novices than Eclipse. Qualitative analysis yields suggestions for improvement for both interfaces and also identifies areas of success. Keywords Novice, Integrated Development Environment, user study

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ECLIPSE
• Authors: Peter C. Rigby, Suzanne Thompson
• Keywords: ECLIPSE 2005, Integrated Development Environment, Quantitative Measures, Software Engineering, User Study