A study on frequently used utility features of integrated development environments by programmers

Abstract

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a software suite that brings together the essential utility features for computer programming. Even though several previous studies had been conducted by reputable scholars by elaborating the fundamental characteristics of IDEs for different programming languages, the particular discipline lacked an understanding of frequently used individual utility features provided with different IDEs. Therefore, this study was conducted with the intention of identifying frequently used utility features of IDEs by software developers to provide a comprehensive illustration for future studies on finding the impact of utility features on the programming skills of software developers. The top seven IDEs according to the market share were considered for the study.