A New Generation of Software Development Tools

The success of the toolkit approach to software development, pioneered with the UNIX(R) system, has been shown in several software development studies. The toolkit consists of a collection of independent general purpose programs that can be glued together by the shell interpreter. The success of this method had far outpaced the advances in the tools themselves. Surprisingly, most of the tools used today have changed little from their original introduction over a decade ago. The weaknesses of the tools, and the need for better tools becomes apparent when they are applied to larger and larger projects.