System compatibility analysis of Eclipse and Netbeans based on bug data

Eclipse and Netbeans are two top of the line Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for Java development. Both of them provide support for a wide variety of development tasks and have a large user base. This paper provides an analysis and comparison for the compatibility and stability of Eclipse and Netbeans on the three most commonly used operating systems, Windows, Linux and Mac OS. Both IDEs are programmed in Java and use a Bugzilla issue tracker to track reported bugs and feature requests. We looked into the Bugzilla repository databases of these two IDEs, which contains the bug records and histories of these two IDEs. We used some basic data mining techniques to analyze some historical statistics of the bug data. Based on the analysis, we try to answer certain stability-comparison oriented questions in the paper, so that users can have a better idea which of these two IDEs is designed better to work on different platforms.