Speculative analysis of integrated development environment recommendations

  • Authors:

  • Kıvanç Muşlu;Yuriy Brun;Reid Holmes;Michael D. Ernst;David Notkin

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA;University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
  • Year:
  • 2012

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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.