Speculative analysis of integrated development environment recommendations

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“Speculative analysis of integrated development environment recommendations” by Kıvanç Muşlu, Yuriy Brun, Reid Holmes, Michael D. Ernst, and David Notkin. In OOPSLA 2012, Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, (Tucson, AZ, USA), Oct. 2012, pp. 669-682.
A previous version appeared as “Improving IDE recommendations by considering global implications of existing recommendations” by Kıvanç Muşlu, Yuriy Brun, Reid Holmes, Michael D. Ernst, and David Notkin. In ICSE NIER, Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering, New Ideas and Emerging Results Track, (Zürich, Switzerland), June 2012, pp. 1349-1352.

Abstract

Modern integrated development environments make recommendations and automate common tasks, such as refactorings, auto-completions, and error corrections. However, these tools present little or no information about the consequences of the recommended changes. For example, a rename refactoring may: modify the source code without changing program semantics; modify the source code and (incorrectly) change program semantics; modify the source code and (incorrectly) create compilation errors; show a name collision warning and require developer input; or show an error and not change the source code. Having to compute the consequences of a recommendation — either mentally or by making source code changes — puts an extra burden on the developers.

This paper aims to reduce this burden with a technique that informs developers of the consequences of code transformations. Using Eclipse Quick Fix as a domain, we describe a plug-in, Quick Fix Scout, that computes the consequences of Quick Fix recommendations. In our experiments, developers completed compilation-error removal tasks 10% faster when using Quick Fix Scout than Quick Fix, although the sample size was not large enough to show statistical significance.

Download: PDF, slides (PDF), slides (PowerPoint), implementation.

BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{MusluBHEN2012-OOPSLA,
   author = {K{\i}van{\c{c}} Mu{\c{s}}lu and Yuriy Brun and Reid Holmes
	and Michael D. Ernst and David Notkin},
   title = {Speculative analysis of integrated development environment
	recommendations},
   booktitle = {OOPSLA 2012, Object-Oriented Programming Systems,
	Languages, and Applications},
   pages = {669--682},
   address = {Tucson, AZ, USA},
   month = oct,
   year = {2012}
}

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