Artificial intelligence for software development — the present and the challenges for the future

Abstract

Since the time when first CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) methods and tools were developed, little has been done in the area of automated creation of code. CASE tools support a software engineer in creation the system structure, in defining interfaces and relationships between software modules and, after the code has been written, in performing testing tasks on different levels of detail. Writing code is still the task of a skilled human, which makes the whole software development a costly and error-prone process. It seems that recent advances in AI area, particularly in deep learning methods, may considerably improve the matters. The paper presents an extensive survey of recent work and achievements in this area reported in the literature, both from the theoretical branch of research and from engineer-oriented approaches. Then, some challenges for the future work are proposed, classified into Full AI, Assisted AI and Supplementary AI research fields. Keywords: software development, artificial intelligence, machine learning, automated code generation