Creating a Free, Dependable Software Engineering Environment for Building Java Applications

As open source software engineering becomes more prevalent, employing sound software engineering practices and the tools used to implement these practices becomes more important. This paper examines the current status of free software engineering tools. For each set of tools, we determined the important attributes that would best assist a developer in each stage of the waterfall model. We rated each tool based on predetermined attributes. We used the creation of a graphical user interface based email client in Java to assist in evaluating each tool. Our findings show that there is still a need for free tools to extract UML diagrams, test graphical user interfaces, make configuring Emacs easier, and profile Java applications. In other areas there are free tools that provide satisfactory functionality such as Concurrent Versions System (CVS), GVim, JUnit, JRefactory, GNU Make, Jakarta Ant, Javadoc, and Doc++.