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EclipseScreenRecorder

A screen capture system for recording Eclipse programming sessions (2006)

EclipseScreenRecorder

Participants

  • CSDL: Hongbing Kou
  • Affiliates: NSF

Summary

The Eclipse Screen Recorder (ESR) is a screen capturing program implemented as an Eclipse plugin that creates snapshots of the Eclipse window at regular intervals and encodes the results as a QuickTime movie. It's developed using the Java Media Framework and Quicktime for Java.

 

ESR was developed for the purposes of cross-validation in empirical software engineering research. For example, the Zorro project is concerned with developing a mechanism that can automatically detect when developers are using Test Driven Design strategies. In order to validate Zorro, we needed a way to independently monitor what developers were doing, in order to determine to what extent Zorro could actually detect TDD in practice. ESR provides us with that "independent" source of data about developer behavior that can allow us to check the accuracy of Zorro's inferencing mechanism.

Software

Installation instructions:
  • Install ESR using the Eclipse Update manager. ESR Eclipse update site is: http://csdl.ics.hawaii.edu/downloads/esr/update/
  • Install Quicktime for Java.
  • Locate the file QTJava.zip, which (on Windows) is typically found in C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTSystem. Copy it to the eclipse/plugins/csdl.esr_1.2.2/lib directory.
  • Restart Eclipse. There should now be a green (start) and red (stop) button in your Eclipse toolbar. To begin recording, press the green button. To end recording, press the stop button.
  • When you have finished recording, your QuickTime movies will be placed in the eclipse/eclipse_screen_recordings directory by default.
  • To adjust the behavior of Eclipse Screen Recorder, see the dialog box in Window | Preferences... | Eclipse Screen Recorder

Publications

See the Zorro Publications Area for a list of publications and technical reports. ESR was used in the evaluation of Zorro.

Status

Complete.

Keywords

empirical software engineering

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