Ozren Dabić

Rosalia Tufano, Federica Pepe, Fiorella Zampetti et al.

The availability of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot is reshaping the way in which software is developed, evolved, and maintained. Oftentimes, developers leave traces of such an usage in software artifacts. This allows not only to understand how AI is used in software development, but also to let others be aware how such software artifacts were created, e.g., for licensing or trustworthiness purposes. This paper-building upon our preliminary work presented at MSR 2024-aims at qualitatively investigating on the self-admitted use of two very popular generative AI tools - ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot - in software development. To this aim, we mined GitHub for such traces, by looking at commits, issues and pull requests (PRs). Then, through a manual coding, we create a taxonomy of 64 different ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot usage tasks, grouped into 7 categories. By repeating our previous analysis two years after and by extending it to GitHub Copilot, we show how the usage avenues have been expanded, the extent to which developers perceived such a generative AI usage useful, and whether some concerns occurring more than one year ago are no longer present. The taxonomy of tasks we derived from such a qualitative study provided (i) developers with valuable insights into how generative AI can be integrated into their workflows, and (ii) researchers with a clear overview of tasks that developers perceive as well-suited for automation.

Ozren Dabic, Emad Aghajani, Gabriele Bavota

Almost every Mining Software Repositories (MSR) study requires, as first step, the selection of the subject software repositories. These repositories are usually collected from hosting services like GitHub using specific selection criteria dictated by the study goal. For example, a study related to licensing might be interested in selecting projects explicitly declaring a license. Once the selection criteria have been defined, utilities such as the GitHub APIs can be used to "query" the hosting service. However, researchers have to deal with usage limitations imposed by these APIs and a lack of required information. For example, the GitHub search APIs allow 30 requests per minute and, when searching repositories, only provide limited information (e.g., the number of commits in a repository is not included). To support researchers in sampling projects from GitHub, we present GHS (GitHub Search), a dataset containing 25 characteristics (e.g., number of commits, license, etc.) of 735,669 repositories written in 10 programming languages. The set of characteristics has been derived by looking for frequently used project selection criteria in MSR studies and the dataset is continuously updated to (i) always provide fresh data about the existing projects, and (ii) increase the number of indexed projects. The GHS dataset can be queried through a web application we built that allows to set many combinations of selection criteria needed for a study and download the information of matching repositories: https://seart-ghs.si.usi.ch.