Meet C4SE: Your New Collaborator for Software Engineering Tasks
Gabriele De Vito, Stefano Lambiase, Fabio Palomba, Filomena Ferrucci · 2023
The software industry’s complexity and scale have increased rapidly, leading to challenges in managing information and tasks among developer teams, often resulting in inefficiencies, misunderstandings, and delays. The extensive search for automated tasks led to using chatbots—conversational agents—in software development. However, despite their positive contributions, their adoption has numerous issues, notably the lack of full working context, making their support sometimes useless. To address such a limitation, we propose C4SE, a chatbot designed to assist software engineers and managers in performing various tasks by gathering information helpful for better support. We use the GPT 3.5 model, and a specialized data store based on a vector database for long-term memory, to understand users’ intentions and maintain contextual information. Our prototype C4SE can perform code suggestions, reviews, GitHub API operations, and generate unit and acceptance test cases. Preliminary evaluation reports encouraging results, showing potential to increase productivity in the software development lifecycle.