Analyzing the evolution of eclipse plugins

Eclipse is a good example of a modern component-based complex system that is designed for long-term evolution, due to its architecture of reusable and extensible components. This paper presents our preliminary results about the evolution of Eclipse's architecture, based on a lightweight and scalable analysis of the metadata in Eclipse's sources. We find that the development of Eclipse follows a systematic process: most architectural changes take place in milestones, and maintenance releases only make exceptional changes to component dependencies. We also found a stable architectural core that remains since the first release.