Vertical Code Completion: Going Beyond the Current Ctrl+Space

Abstract

In the software development field, the amount of data related to documentation and to the source code itself is huge. Relevant knowledge can be extracted from this data,provided that adequate tools are in place. In this context, data mining can be seen as an important tool. This paper presents an approach to mine sequential patterns from source code and to suggest these patterns to developers, according to what is being coded. As a result, a plug in for the Eclipse IDE, called Vertical Code Completion, was developed and applied over the source code repository of an academic management system.The obtained patterns were analyzed by the developers of this system with different expertise levels and the proposed approach reached good results, indicating that 71.6% of the suggestions were relevant.