A Case Study of Developing an IDE for Embedded Software Using Open Source

IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) support software developers in their implementation work. However, embedded software has specific requirements, so an off-the-shelf IDE for this purpose does not exist. In such a case, this paper recommends developing a customized IDE based on open source software. We present a case study of developing such an IDE for the languages C#, Python and JavaScript. We used several open source projects with varying project status as a basis for our development. We analyzed developer communication within these open source projects and identified the benefits and the potential pitfalls for the case study. Moreover, we present the effort made in terms of person months and that reuse of open source software improves cost-efficiency for the development of such IDEs.