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Tests as Specifications Towards Better Code Completion
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Campos, Diogo Miguel Rebelo Borges Amado De |
| Copyright Year | 2019 |
| Abstract | Software development is inherently complex, both from a technical and a process standpoint. Over the years, progress has been made to simplify and accelerate it, with the advent of higher level programming languages and build systems on the technical side and software development processes focused on agility on the process side. Live Programming entails the notion of providing live feedback to developers, reducing the feedback loop of the edit-compile-run software development cycle and fastening the software development process. Existing code completion tools, commonly used by developers, provide them with syntactic suggestions as live feedback, but still lack the ability to provide semantic ones. Automated Program Repair is an area of research focused on automating the act of fixing bugs, one of the complex tasks in software development. While current solutions display promising results, they also present some limitations, namely in terms of maintainability of the code or in producing overfitted patches. Combining both these areas, we propose a live Automated Program Repair tool, here implemented as an extension to Visual Studio Code, which leverages unit tests as specifications and generates code variations to repair bugs in JavaScript code. With this, we provide real-time semantic suggestions to developers while they write code, achieving a level 5 in the liveness hierarchy, corresponding to tactically predictive feedback. Furthermore, by doing so, we believe that such an approach would allow developers to discard those suggestions they deem as overfitted or as reducing maintainability. The patches (candidate repairs to the faulty program) are generated by using a mutation-based Automated Program Repair technique, which enables us to generate candidate solutions in a timely manner and find fixes within the time constraints required to offer liveness as an attribute. An empirical study with 16 participants was conducted, with results showing that a live Automated Program Repair tool improves the speed of developers in repairing faulty programs. In addition, we establish that there is a difference in the final code of developers using the extension when compared with those not using it. The contributions of this work include the implemented Visual Studio Code extension as well as the aforementioned empirical study. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/bitstream/10216/123016/2/359886.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
