Chapter 30. Programming Tools

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Contents

• Design Tools page 710

• Source-Code Tools page 710

• Executable-Code Tools page 716

• Tool-Oriented Environments page 720

• Building Your Own Programming Tools page 721

• Tool Fantasyland page 722

Related Topics

• Version-control tools: in Section 28.2

• Debugging tools: Section 23.5

• Test-support tools: Section 22.5

Modern programming tools decrease the amount of time required for construction. Use of a leading-edge tool set and familiarity with the tools used can increase productivity by 50 percent or more (Jones 2000; Boehm et al. 2000). Programming tools can also reduce the amount of tedious detail work that programming requires.

A dog might be man's best friend, but a few good tools are a programmer's best friends. As Barry Boehm discovered long ago, 20 percent of the tools tend to account for 80 percent of the tool usage (1987b). If you're missing one of the more helpful tools, you're missing something that you could use a lot.

This chapter is focused in two ways. First, it covers only construction tools. Requirements-specification, management, and end-to-end-development tools are outside the scope of the book. Refer to the "Additional Resources" section at the end of the chapter for more information on tools for those aspects of software development. Second, this chapter covers kinds of tools rather than specific brands. A few tools are so common that they're discussed by name, but specific versions, products, and companies change so quickly that information about most of them would be out of date before the ink on these pages was dry.

A programmer can work for many years without discovering some of the most valuable tools available. The mission of this chapter is to survey available tools and help you determine whether you've overlooked any tools that might be useful. If you're a tool expert, you won't find much new information in this chapter. You might skim the earlier parts of the chapter, read Section 30.6 on "Tool Fantasyland," and then move on to the next chapter.