There's now a "Lack of Progress Bar" plugin for Eclipse, that tracks how long developers wait for background jobs to complete. There's an actual use to it! It's meant to focus on how much time the process wastes. As the website says in the "Why use Lopb" section:

Produce ‘hard numbers’ as supporting evidence to convince managers or other non-developers that investments in better/faster development tools and infrastructure have led or will lead to positive ROI in terms of time saved.

Although let's be real, it's also funny.

The name's funny - how do you pronounce it? (I pronounce it "red dwarf," just like I pronounce my last name as "Smif" even though it's spelled "Mayhew") 

Plus, I've spent a while wondering if the point of Lopb was to highlight how much time Eclipse spends blocking your productivity - maybe it'd push developers and managers to other IDEs to get away from the Eclipse behavior, or just to get away from the behavior being tracked.

Follow my logic here: Lobp shows 30 minutes a day being tossed down the disposal. Manager John says "You can't be wasting 30 minutes a day! Use that 30 minutes!" So you switch away from Eclipse, still losing the 30 minutes a day, but now it's not being tracked. Everyone wins, except Eclipse.

Of course, that's silly logic too, but then again, you're talking programmer metrics, where we think lines of code is a good metric, too.

It's not the plain vanilla Eclipse IDE that wastes a lot of my time every day.

It's the Eclipse derived IDEs that I spend countless hours with a day waiting for background jobs to complete (e.g. open/close/edit files, compile, build,  GUI refresh, etc.).  The Eclipse based IDEs that I use are :

• IBM Rational Software Architect
• IBM WebSphere Integration Developer

The reason why we built LOPB was to convince our department managers that our development laptops needed an increase in RAM in order to run Websphere, RAD, etc., and our company's Clearcase server was just too darn slow. They just didn't understand us without numbers so Aaron, Abhishek and I built the plugin over a couple of evenings and a weekend or two. It did what we needed it to do at the time. If it helps anyone else out there, cool. If the name and documentation makes anyone laugh, even better :-)

A tool that uses the progress bar to demonstrate lack of progress.  As my grandma used to say: "What will they think of next?"

Lack of progress would occur only when the developer is making progress.  Its only when the user tries to do anything when lack of progress is measurable.  There is some kind of catch-22 paradox there.  The least bit of lack-of-progress would be measured the less Eclipse is used.  Therefore, the most progress would be achieved if Eclipse is used very little.

This is a genious stroke.  Soon all IDE's will have a lack of progress bar so that any developer can acheive the maximum progress by NOT using any of them!

I can definitely sympathize with the Alex and his colleagues who wrote this plugin. It would have been invaluable on my last project where myself and the other developers and often had to wait for our underpowered, overburdened PCs running MyEclipse with the ClearCase plugin to sync SCM updates and perform workspace builds.

Sometimes we would have to wait ten to fifteen minutes for a build, sometimes longer. Checking out hundreds of classes for model reverse engineering could take up to an hour. Hey, at least it was a good excuse to get a coffee across the street. :-)  Alex, I sent a link to your plugin to my buddies, I am sure they will also appreciate it. :-)

I can definitely sympathize with the Alex and his colleagues who wrote this plugin. It would have been invaluable on my last project where myself and the other developers and often had to wait for our underpowered, overburdened PCs running MyEclipse with the ClearCase plugin to sync SCM updates and perform workspace builds.

Sometimes we would have to wait ten to fifteen minutes for a build, sometimes longer. Checking out hundreds of classes for model reverse engineering could take up to an hour. Hey, at least it was a good excuse to get a coffee across the street. :-)  Alex, I sent a link to your plugin to my buddies, I am sure they will also appreciate it. :-)

I'll second, third and forth that sentiment. Having to use under powered laptops to run Websphere + RAD + Clearcase is just painful. Even with 4Gb of RAM, it's painfully slow compared to using plain eclipse + tomcat. Obviously, comparing websphere to tomcat isn't fair. At the last place where websphere was used, there were no EJB and everything was servlets and jsp, so there was no need to suffer websphere.

Creator of WebSphere says it was the biggest technology mistake he ever made - BBC News

http://www.dzone.com/links/creator_of_websphere_says_it_was_the_biggest_tech.html

What's the biggest technology mistake you ever made - either at work or in your own life?

"When I was at IBM, I started a product called Websphere [which helps companies to operate and integrate business applications across multiple computing platforms].
Because I had come from working on big mission-critical systems, I thought it needs to be scalable, reliable, have a single point of control ... I tried to build something like a mainframe, a system that was capable of doing anything, that would be able to do what might be needed in five years.
I call it the endgame fallacy. It was too complex for people to master. I overdesigned it.
Because we were IBM, we survived it, but if we'd been a start-up, we'd have gone to the wall."