The problems with eclipse modeling tools: a topic analysis of eclipse forums

Eclipse offers a wide range of tools supporting various aspects of modeling and Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Arguably, the Eclipse ecosystem has been and continues to be one of the most important modeling tool repositories and sources of information about these tools, with, for example, more than 180,000 posts in the modeling forums since 2002. In this paper, we collect and analyze the content of the 30 most widely used Eclipse forums associated with different modeling and MDE tools, such as EMF, Xtext, ATL, Epsilon, and GMF. Using state-of-the-art text mining techniques coupled with manual analysis, we explore these forums with respect to two important questions: What are the primary issues, problems, and challenges raised in the use of these tools? And, perhaps even more important: Which of these issues are most commonly faced by "newbies" in the MDE community? Our study provides supporting evidence for some commonly held but unproven beliefs, such that plug-ins and documentation issues are the most common, and suggests which issues actually present the biggest "barriers to entry" for new users of MDE tools, and how they might be addressed.