Task-Oriented API Usage Examples Prompting Powered By Programming Task Knowledge Graph

TL;DR

This paper presents a knowledge graph-based approach to improve task-oriented API usage example prompting in IDEs, enhancing action coverage and relevance to assist developers more effectively.

Contribution

It introduces a method to expand knowledge graph actions, a code matching task search, and an IDE tool for better tutorial recommendation and code example highlighting.

Findings

High-quality knowledge graph constructed and validated.

Code matching improves relevance of recommended code solutions.

User study shows increased developer assistance in finding tutorials.

Abstract

Programming tutorials are often created to demonstrate programming tasks with code examples. However, our study of Stack Overflow questions reveals the low utilization of high-quality programming tutorials, which is caused task description mismatch and code information overload. Document search can find relevant tutorial documents, but they often cannot find specific programming actions and code solutions relevant to the developers' task needs. The recently proposed activity-centric search over knowledge graph supports direct search of programming actions, but it has limitations in action coverage, natural language based task search, and coarse-grained code example recommendation. In this work, we enhance action coverage in knowledge graph with actions extracted from comments in code examples and more forms of activity sentences. To overcome the task description mismatch problem, we develop a code matching based task search method to find relevant programming actions and code examples to the code under development. We integrate our knowledge graph and task search method in the IDE, and develop an observe-push based tool to prompt developers with task-oriented API usage examples. To alleviate the code information overload problem, our tool highlights programming action and API information in the prompted tutorial task excerpts and code examples based on the underlying knowledge graph. Our evaluation confirms the high quality of the constructed knowledge graph, and show that our code matching based task search can recommend effective code solutions to programming issues asked on Stack Overflow. A small-scale user study demonstrates that our tool is useful for assisting developers in finding and using relevant programming tutorials in their programming tasks.