An evaluation of the strategies of sorting, filtering, and grouping API methods for Code Completion

Abstract

Abstract-Code Completion is one of the most popular IDE features for accessing APIs, freeing programmers from remembering specific details about an API and reducing keystrokes. We propose three ways to enhance the current code-completion systems to work more effectively with large APIs. First, we propose two methods for sorting APIs, by type hierarchy and by use count, and show that their use significantly reduces the number of API proposals a user must navigate while using Code Completion. Second, we show that context-specific filtering of inappropriate proposals can also reduce the number of proposals a user must navigate. Third, we propose to group API proposals by their functional roles, which can help maintain a well-ordered, meaningful list of API proposals in the presence of dynamic reordering. These functionalities are grouped into a research prototype, BCC (Better Code Completion). We evaluated fourteen configurations of BCC by simulating Code Completion nearly three million times on nine open-source Java projects that utilize AWT/Swing.

Mining API Usage Patterns by Applying Method Categorization to Improve Code Completion

“…This kind of experiments for code completion is adopted from the evaluation that has been done by Hou and Pletcher [24]. The specific purpose of these experiments is to know how well our code completion can predict the next method invocation while developers write their code.…”

“…There are two scenarios when developers use code completion [24]. The first scenario is that developers know what methods they want to invoke, but they still call code completion and type the method straightly.…”

Multi-dimensional exploration of API usage

“…Bruch et al develop intelligent code completion that narrows down the possible suggestions to those API elements that are actually relevant [24]. Hou et al [25] compare different filtering, sorting and grouping strategies to this end. The latter would, for instance, group all methods related to managing the components of an AWT container.…”

Stepwise API usage assistance using n -gram language models

“…The Better Code Completion (BCC) system [31] sorts, filters and groups API methods. Sorting, has two options, first is a type-hierarchy-based sorting, which proposes the methods from the declared type before its super type, which is very useful since in certain contexts methods like wait() are never used.…”