An empirical study of the evolution of Eclipse third-party plug-ins

Since the inception of Lehman's software evolution laws in the early 1970s, they have attracted significant attention from the research community. However, to our knowledge, no study of applicability of these laws on the software systems that exhibit constrained evolution process has been carried out so far. In this paper we take a first step in this direction and investigate the constrained evolution of 21 Eclipse third-party plug-ins. We investigate the trends followed by the plug-ins dependencies on Eclipse over time. The study spans 6 years of the evolution of Eclipse evolving from release 3.0 to release 3.5. Our findings confirm the laws of continuing change, self regulation and continuing growth when metrics related to dependencies between the plug-ins and the Eclipse Architecture are considered. Unlike this, the conservation of familiarity law was not confirmed and the results for the declining quality law were inconclusive.