A Simple, Efficient and Robust Code Completion System for ESTI Development Environment

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As one of the oldest IT companies in Western Canada, ESTI not only builds custom software for its clients, but also provides reengineering and professional services to the existing software of its clients. As such technical leads and developers at ESTI have to deal with software of different varieties, domains and most importantly, software developed by third party development teams. During development the developers heavily rely on various frameworks and libraries and use their corresponding APIs (application program interfaces). The problem is that APIs are hard to learn due to various factors, such as inadequate examples and documentation. Although modern IDEs have a code completion feature, it is limited in the sense that they are solely based on the compiler features of the corresponding programming languages. Software of a particular domain and variety might have been developed with a dedicated set of frameworks and libraries (along with other domain oriented technologies), and thus with a certain set of APIs by a certain development team. This issue is even more crucial for ESTI since they also need to deal with client-specific software of different domains and varieties developed by third party development teams in their daily activities. Developers at ESTI often face difficulties and spend a significant amount of time manually looking for appropriate code completions for a given context and they do this mostly on ad-hoc basis. Our research work will address this non-trivial problem the company is facing with growing need, and will deliver an automatic code completion tool by taking into account what is already present in the subject systems (i.e., existing source code examples) and by considering the context of the developer. Such automated code completion support is likely to increase developers' productivity, make it easier for them to even work with third party client software, avoid introducing external dependencies by using the already used frameworks and libraries in them, and results in more understandable code. This would thus contribute to improved product quality and service, and overall revenue of the company.