An Analysis Method for the Impact of GenAI Code Suggestions on Software Engineers’ Thought Processes

Abstract

Interactive generative AI can be used in software programming to generate sufficient quality of code. Software developers can utilize the output code of generative AI as well as website resources from search engine results. In this research, we present a framework for defining states of programming activity and for capturing the actions of developers in a time series. We also describe a scheme for analyzing the thought process of software developers by using a graph structure to describe state transitions. By applying these means, we showed that it is feasible to analyze the effects of changes in the development environment on programming activities.