For decades, much software engineering research has been dedicated to devising automated solutions aimed at enhancing developer productivity and elevating software quality. The past two decades have witnessed an unparalleled surge in the development of intelligent solutions tailored for software engineering tasks. This momentum established the Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering (AI4SE) area, which has swiftly become one of the most active and popular areas within the software engineering field. This Future of Software Engineering (FoSE) paper navigates through several focal points. It commences with a succinct introduction and history of AI4SE. Thereafter, it underscores the core challenges inherent to AI4SE, particularly highlighting the need to realize trustworthy and synergistic AI4SE. Progressing, the paper paints a vision for the potential leaps achievable if AI4SE's key challenges are surmounted, suggesting a transition towards Software Engineering 2.0. Two strategic roadmaps are then laid out: one centered on realizing trustworthy AI4SE, and the other on fostering synergistic AI4SE. While this paper may not serve as a conclusive guide, its intent is to catalyze further progress. The ultimate aspiration is to position AI4SE as a linchpin in redefining the horizons of software engineering, propelling us toward Software Engineering 2.0.

pdf/trustworthy-and-synergistic-artificial-intelligence-for-51vds557v3.pdf

Trustworthy and Synergistic Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering: Vision and Roadmaps

Repository-level code completion aims to generate code for unfinished code snippets within the context of a specified repository. Existing approaches mainly rely on retrieval-augmented generation strategies due to limitations in input sequence length. However, traditional lexical-based retrieval methods like BM25 struggle to capture code semantics, while model-based retrieval methods face challenges due to the lack of labeled data for training. Therefore, we propose RLCoder, a novel reinforcement learning framework, which can enable the retriever to learn to retrieve useful content for code completion without the need for labeled data. Specifically, we iteratively evaluate the usefulness of retrieved content based on the perplexity of the target code when provided with the retrieved content as additional context, and provide feedback to update the retriever parameters. This iterative process enables the retriever to learn from its successes and failures, gradually improving its ability to retrieve relevant and high-quality content. Considering that not all situations require information beyond code files and not all retrieved context is helpful for generation, we also introduce a stop signal mechanism, allowing the retriever to decide when to retrieve and which candidates to retain autonomously. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that RLCoder consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CrossCodeEval and RepoEval, achieving 12.2% EM improvement over previous methods. Moreover, experiments show that our framework can generalize across different programming languages and further improve previous methods like RepoCoder. We provide the code and data at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/RLCoder. 

pdf/rlcoder-reinforcement-learning-for-repository-level-code-5sjz37lgbmpu.pdf

RLCoder: Reinforcement Learning for Repository-Level Code Completion

Code generation aims to synthesize code and fulfill functional requirements based on natural language (NL) specifications, which can greatly improve development efficiency. In the era of large language models (LLMs), large code models (LCMs) have been recently proposed to generate source code. LCMs can generate highly feasible solutions for programming problems described in natural language. Despite the effectiveness, we observe a noticeable multilingual bias in the generation performance of LCMs. Specifically, LCMs demonstrate proficiency in generating solutions when provided with instructions in English, yet may falter when faced with semantically equivalent instructions in other NLs such as Chinese. Moreover, the ability of LCMs to generate code exhibits variety across different programming languages (PLs), such as Python and C++. The observed phenomenon indicates the presence of multi-lingual bias within the generative capabilities of LCMs, which has remained unexplored. In this paper, we aim to investigate the multi-lingual bias that exists in current LCMs. First, we initiate our investigation by constructing the first multi-lingual evaluation benchmark X-HumanEval-X, enabling us to systematically evaluate the extent of multi-lingual bias that exists in current LCMs. In our large-scale experiments on nine popular LCMs, we observe a pronounced multi-lingual bias of LCMs in code generation, including multi-NL and multi-PL bias. Specifically, when using Chinese instructions, the code generation capabilities of LCMs decrease by at least 13% in terms of the Pass@1 metric. Furthermore, LCMs perform variously across different programming languages, e.g., the performance gap between Python and C++ reaches as high as 20.9%. ... 

pdf/exploring-multi-lingual-bias-of-large-code-models-in-code-4tf3fsqhji.pdf

Exploring Multi-Lingual Bias of Large Code Models in Code Generation

pdf/using-ai-based-coding-assistants-in-practice-state-of-ke04mx3v0axs.pdf

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

With the recent advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), AI-based code generation tools have achieved significant progress and become a practical solution for software development. GitHub Copilot, referred to as AI pair programmer, utilizes machine learning models that are trained on a large corpus of code snippets to generate code suggestions or auto-complete code using natural language processing. Despite its popularity, there is little empirical evidence on the actual experiences of software developers who work with Copilot. To this end, we conducted an empirical study to understand the issues and challenges that developers face when using Copilot in practice, as well as their underlying causes and potential solutions. We collected data from 476 GitHub issues, 706 GitHub discussions, and 184 Stack Overflow posts, and identified the issues, causes that trigger the issues, and solutions that resolve the issues when using Copilot. Our results reveal that (1) Usage Issue and Compatibility Issue are the most common problems faced by Copilot users, (2) Copilot Internal Issue, Network Connection Issue, and Editor/IDE Compatibility Issue are identified as the most frequent causes, and (3) Bug Fixed by Copilot, Modify Configuration/Setting, and Use Suitable Version are the predominant solutions. Based on the results, we delve into the main challenges users encounter when implementing Copilot in practical development, the possible impact of Copilot on the coding process, aspects in which Copilot can be further enhanced, and potential new features desired by Copilot users.

pdf/on-the-concerns-of-developers-when-using-github-copilot-1hu9fzve2i.pdf

On the Concerns of Developers When Using GitHub Copilot

Code completion has become a common practice for programmers during their daily programming activities. It automatically predicts the next tokens or statements that the programmers may use. Code completion aims to substantially save keystrokes and improve the programming efficiency for programmers. Although there exists substantial research on code completion, it is still unclear what practitioner expectations are on code completion and whether these expectations are met by the existing research. To address these questions, we perform a study by first interviewing 15 professionals and then surveying 599 practitioners from 18 IT companies about their expectations on code completion. We then compare the practitioner expectations with the existing research by conducting a literature review of papers on code completion published in major publication venues from 2012 to 2022. Based on the comparison, we highlight the directions desirable for researchers to invest efforts toward developing code completion techniques for meeting practitioner expectations.

How Practitioners Expect Code Completion?

Development teams in large companies often maintain a huge codebase whose build time can be painfully long in a single machine. To reduce the build time, tools such as Bazel and distcc are used to build the code base in a distributed way. However, in the process of distributed build, certain remote slave machines can crash due to two types of errors: Out Of Memory (OOM) and Deadline Exceeded (DE) errors. These crashes lead to time-consuming rebuilds, as suffered by the WeiXin Group (WXG) of Tencent Inc. (the vendor of WeChat, a highly popular mobile app in China). Aiming to prevent these two types of errors, in this paper, we propose a new approach named PCRLINEAR, which predicts the memory and time requirements of the given C++ file, allowing the underlying distributed build system to schedule compilation resources adaptively according to the prediction results. Our experiments show that PCRLINEAR reduces the number of OOM and DE errors from 5% to 0.2% and, at the same time, achieves substantial build-performance improvement of 30% on average.

Predicting Compilation Resources for Adaptive Build in an Industrial Setting

—Code completion has become a common practice for programmers during their daily programming activities. It aims at automatically predicting the next tokens or lines that the programmers tend to use. A good code completion tool can substantially save keystrokes and improve the programming efﬁciency for programmers. Recently, various techniques for code completion have been proposed for usage in practice. However, it is still unclear what are practitioners’ expectations on code completion and whether existing research has met their demands. To ﬁll the gap, we perform an empirical study by ﬁrst interviewing 15 practitioners and then surveying 599 practitioners from 18 IT companies about their expectations on code completion. We then compare the practitioners’ demands with current research via conducting a literature review of papers on code completion published in premier publication venues from 2012 to 2022. Based on the comparison, we highlight the directions desirable for researchers to invest efforts towards developing code completion techniques for meeting practitioners’ expectations.

Practitioners' Expectations on Code Completion

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How Practitioners Expect Code Completion?

Predicting Compilation Resources for Adaptive Build in an Industrial Setting

Practitioners' Expectations on Code Completion