Siri, Write the Next Method… (article highlight)

BIld av yangjiepsy01 från Pixabay

Wen2021a.pdf (usi.ch)

I’ve came across this article by accident. Essentially I do not even remember what I was looking for, but that’s maybe not so important. Either way, I really want to try this tool.

This research study is about designing a tool for code completion, but not just a completion of a word/statement/variable, but providing a signature of the next method to implement.

From the abstract: “Code completion is one of the killer features of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), and researchers have proposed different methods to improve its accuracy. While these techniques are valuable to speed up code writing, they are limited to recommendations related to the next few tokens a developer is likely to type given the current context. In the best case, they can recommend a few APIs that a developer is likely to use next. We present FeaRS, a novel retrieval-based approach that, given the current code a developer is writing in the IDE, can recommend the next complete method (i.e., signature and method body) that the developer is likely to implement. To do this, FeaRS exploits “implementation patterns” (i.e., groups of methods usually implemented within the same task) learned by mining thousands of open source projects. We instantiated our approach to the specific context of Android apps. A large-scale empirical evaluation we performed across more than 20k apps shows encouraging preliminary results, but also highlights future challenges to overcome.”

As far as I understand, this is a plug-in to android studio, so I will probably need to see if I can use it outside of this context. However, it seems to be very interesting….

Author: Miroslaw Staron

I’m professor in Software Engineering at IT faculty. I usually blog about interesting articles (for me) and my own reflections on the development of Software Engineering, AI, computer science and automotive software.