Practitioners' Expectations on Code Completion

Abstract: 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.