Businge, JohnSerebrenik, Alexandervan den Brand, Mark2023-02-052023-02-052012Businge, J., Serebrenik, A., & van den Brand, M. (2012, September). Survival of Eclipse third-party plug-ins. In 2012 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) (pp. 368-377). IEEE.978-1-4673-2312-3https://nru.uncst.go.ug/handle/123456789/7564Today numerous software systems are being developed on top of frameworks. In this study, we analyzed the survival of 467 Eclipse third-party plug-ins altogether having 1,447 versions. We classify these plug-ins into two categories: those that depend on only stable and supported Eclipse APIs and those that depend on at least one of the potentially unstable, discouraged and unsupported Eclipse non-APIs. Comparing the two categories of plug-ins, we observed that the plug-ins depending solely on APIs have a very high source compatibility success rate compared to those that depend on at least one of the non-APIs. However, we have also observed that recently released plug-ins that depend on non-APIs also have a very high forward source compatibility success rate. This high source compatibility success rate is due to the dependency structure of these plug-ins: recently released plug-ins that depend on non-A PIs predominantly depend on old Eclipse nonAPIs rather than on newly introduced ones. Finally, we showed that the majority of plug-ins hosted on SourceForge do not evolve beyond the first year of release.enEclipseThird-party plug-insAPIsNon-APIsOther