A search-and-fill strategy to code generation for complex software requirements

Abstract

Context:

The realm of software development has seen significant transformations with the rise of Low-Code Development (LCD) and the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly large language models, into coding practices. The proliferation of open-source software also offers vast resources for developers.

Objective:

We aim to combine the benefits of modifying retrieved code with the use of an extensive code repository to tackle the challenges of complex control structures and multifunctional requirements in software development.

Method:

Our study introduces a Search-and-Fill strategy that utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to dissect complex software requirements. It extracts control structures and identifies atomic function points. By leveraging large-scale pre-trained models, the strategy searches for these elements to fill in the automatically transformed program structures derived from descriptions of control structures. This process generates a code snippet that includes program control structures and the implementations of various function points, thereby facilitating both code reuse and efficient development.

Results:

We have validated the effectiveness of our strategy in generating code snippets. For natural language requirements involving multifunctional complex structures, we constructed two datasets: the Basic Complex Requirements Dataset (BCRD) and the Advanced Complex Requirements Dataset (ACRD). These datasets are based on natural language descriptions and Python code that were randomly extracted and combined. For the code snippets to be generated, we achieved the best results with the ACRD dataset, with BLEU-4 scores reaching up to 0.6326 and TEDS scores peaking at 0.7807.

Conclusion:

The Search-and-Fill strategy successfully generates a comprehensive code snippets, integrating essential control structures and functions to streamline the development process. Experimental results substantiate our strategy’s efficacy in optimizing code reuse by effectively integrating preprocessing and selection optimization approach. Future research will focus on enhancing the recognition of complex software requirements and further refining the code snippets.