GitHub Copilot AI pair programmer: Asset or Liability?

This repository contains the replication package for our Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) paper titled: GitHub Copilot AI pair programmer: Asset or Liability? submitted on June 2022. This repository, contains our detailed results and the python scripts which were used for generating them.

In this paper, we study Copilot's abilities as a pair-programmer by:

• Testing its abilities on code generation for fundamental software engineering algorithms.
• Comparing its generated codes with humans on programming tasks.

This repository is broken into two directories:

• Copilot_on_Algorithm_Design: contains the python scripts and the results which were used to answer RQ1 of our paper: Can Copilot suggest correct and efficient solutions for some basic algorithmic problems?
• Copilot_vs_human: contains the python scripts and the results which were used to answer RQ2 of our paper: Are Copilot’s solutions competitive with humans’ solutions in solving programming problems?

Requirements

To replicate our results, you need:

• Python 3.7
• Access to GitHub Copilot

Structure

• Copilot_on_Algorithm_Design contains all the python scripts and the results for RQ1:
  • python_comparison.py: Provides functions for comparing the abstract syntax trees of two python programs.
  • similarity_checker.py: checks the python script in each sub-directory, compares the ASTs and stores the results in a csv file.
  • There are 4 sub-directories which were named after the algorithm category which we were testing Copilot on (Binary_Trees, Elementary_Graph_Algorithms, Greedy_Algorithms, Sorting_algorithms):
    • Each sub-directory contains directories for each of the algorithms that we tested Copilot on.
      • Each algorithm directory contains 6 .txt files which contain the suggestion of Copilot for each experiment.
      • The PyScript directory contains the Python scripts which were made for each of Copilot's suggestions. These scripts were used for comparing AST similarity between suggestions. _ The PyScript folder also contains the comparison_results.csv. This csv file is the output of running similarity_checker.py on the Python scripts.
    • Each sub-directory contains and Excel file which contains the entire results of the experiments alongside our comments.
• Copilot_vs_Human contains all the python scripts and the results for RQ2: