在实践中使用基于人工智能的编码助手：现状、看法和前进方向

IF 3.8 2区计算机科学 Q2 COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Information and Software Technology Pub Date : 2024-10-29 DOI:10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107610

Agnia Sergeyuk , Yaroslav Golubev , Timofey Bryksin , Iftekhar Ahmed

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引用次数: 0

摘要

背景：在过去几年中，代码人工智能助手--基于人工智能的软件工程多用途助手--应运而生。目标：我们旨在更好地了解开发人员是如何具体使用人工智能助手的，他们为什么不在开发工作流程的某些部分使用人工智能助手，以及未来需要改进的地方。方法：在这项工作中，我们针对如何使用人工智能助手进行了大规模调查，重点关注特定的软件开发活动和阶段。我们收集了 481 名程序员对五大活动的意见：(a) 实现新功能，(b) 编写测试，(c) 错误分流，(d) 重构，(e) 编写自然语言工件，以及它们的各个阶段。结果：我们的结果对使用人工智能助手的不同阶段进行了新颖的比较，既全面又详细。它强调了开发人员认为不太愉快并希望委托给人工智能助手的特定活动，例如编写测试和自然语言工件。我们还确定了使用人工智能助手的更细化阶段，如生成测试和生成文档，以及工作流程中研究较少的部分，如生成测试数据。在不使用人工智能助手的原因中，有信任和公司政策等一般方面的原因，也有缺乏项目规模背景等更具体的问题，这些都是未来研究的重点。不使用人工智能助手的主要原因可作为今后工作的指南。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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Using AI-based coding assistants in practice: State of affairs, perceptions, and ways forward

Context:

The last several years saw the emergence of AI assistants for code — multi-purpose AI-based helpers in software engineering. As they become omnipresent in all aspects of software development, it becomes critical to understand their usage patterns.

Objective:

We aim to better understand how specifically developers are using AI assistants, why they are not using them in certain parts of their development workflow, and what needs to be improved in the future.

Methods:

In this work, we carried out a large-scale survey aimed at how AI assistants are used, focusing on specific software development activities and stages. We collected opinions of 481 programmers on five broad activities: (a) implementing new features, (b) writing tests, (c) bug triaging, (d) refactoring, and (e) writing natural-language artifacts, as well as their individual stages.

Results:

Our results provide a novel comparison of different stages where AI assistants are used that is both comprehensive and detailed. It highlights specific activities that developers find less enjoyable and want to delegate to an AI assistant, e.g., writing tests and natural-language artifacts. We also determine more granular stages where AI assistants are used, such as generating tests and generating docstrings, as well as less studied parts of the workflow, such as generating test data. Among the reasons for not using assistants, there are general aspects like trust and company policies, as well as more concrete issues like the lack of project-size context, which can be the focus of the future research.

Conclusion:

The provided analysis highlights stages of software development that developers want to delegate and that are already popular for using AI assistants, which can be a good focus for features aimed to help developers right now. The main reasons for not using AI assistants can serve as a guideline for future work.

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来源期刊

Information and Software Technology 工程技术-计算机：软件工程

CiteScore

9.10

自引率

7.70%

发文量

164

审稿时长

9.6 weeks

期刊介绍： Information and Software Technology is the international archival journal focusing on research and experience that contributes to the improvement of software development practices. The journal''s scope includes methods and techniques to better engineer software and manage its development. Articles submitted for review should have a clear component of software engineering or address ways to improve the engineering and management of software development. Areas covered by the journal include: • Software management, quality and metrics, • Software processes, • Software architecture, modelling, specification, design and programming • Functional and non-functional software requirements • Software testing and verification & validation • Empirical studies of all aspects of engineering and managing software development Short Communications is a new section dedicated to short papers addressing new ideas, controversial opinions, "Negative" results and much more. Read the Guide for authors for more information. The journal encourages and welcomes submissions of systematic literature studies (reviews and maps) within the scope of the journal. Information and Software Technology is the premiere outlet for systematic literature studies in software engineering.