Improving IDE recommendations by considering global implications of existing recommendations

Kivanc Muslu, Yuriy Brun, Reid Holmes, Michael D. Ernst, David Notkin
2012 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)  
Modern integrated development environments (IDEs) offer recommendations to aid development, such as autocompletions, refactorings, and fixes for compilation errors. Recommendations for each code location are typically computed independently of the other locations. We propose that an IDE should consider the whole codebase, not just the local context, before offering recommendations for a particular location. We demonstrate the potential benefits of our technique by presenting four concrete
more » ... ios in which the Eclipse IDE fails to provide proper Quick Fixes at relevant locations, even though it offers those fixes at other locations. We describe a technique that can augment an existing IDE's recommendations to account for non-local information. For example, when some compilation errors depend on others, our technique helps the developer decide which errors to resolve first.
doi:10.1109/icse.2012.6227082 dblp:conf/icse/MusluBHEN12 fatcat:xgj3gzwwmbepjobxeesb7cm2ue