RT Conference Proceedings
T1 The Hidden Cost of Code Completion: Understanding the Impact of the Recommendation-list Length on its Efficiency.
A1 Jin, Xianhao
A1 Servant-Cortés, Francisco Javier
K1 Software - Mantenimiento
AB Automatic code completion is a useful and popular technique that software developers use to write code more effectively and efficiently. However, while the benefits of code completion are clear, its cost is yet not well understood. We hypothesize the existence of a hidden cost of code completion, which mostly impacts developers when code completion techniques produce long recommendations. We study this hidden cost of code completion by evaluating how the length of the recommendation list affects other factors that may cause inefficiencies in the process. We study how common long recommendations are, whether they often provide low-ranked correct items, whether they incur longer time to be assessed, and whether they were more prevalent when developers did not select any item in the list. In our study, we observe evidence for all these factors, confirming the existence of a hidden cost of code completion.
PB ACM
YR 2018
FD 2018
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/34958
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/34958
LA eng
NO Xianhao Jin and Francisco Servant. 2018. The hidden cost of code completion: understanding the impact of the recommendation-list length on its efficiency. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY , USA, 70–73. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196398.3196474
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 20 ene 2026