Towards integrating e-mail communication in the IDE
Alberto Bacchelli, Michele Lanza, Vitezslav Humpa · 2010
Software developers spend a large part of their working time using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). How-ever, IDEs are usually disconnected from the means of com-munication programmers use to interact and discuss with other co-workers. Because of this, many context switches are required and the existing connection between source code artifacts and artifacts generated from recorded communica-tions, such as e-mails, cannot be effectively put to good use. In this paper, we introduce Remail, an Eclipse plugin to integrate e-mail communication in the IDE. It allows devel-opers to seamlessly handle source code entities and e-mails concerning the source code. We present our preliminary work on Remail that allows linking source code classes to the e-mails in which they are discussed, thus providing an updated and effective documentation.