Transforming Software Development: Evaluating the Efficiency and Challenges of GitHub Copilot in Real-World Projects
It quantifies productivity gains and challenges for developers using AI coding assistants, though it is incremental in assessing an existing tool.
This study evaluated GitHub Copilot's efficiency in real-world software development, finding it saved up to 50% time on code documentation and 30-40% on repetitive tasks, but struggled with complex or proprietary code.
Generative AI technologies promise to transform the product development lifecycle. This study evaluates the efficiency gains, areas for improvement, and emerging challenges of using GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered coding assistant. We identified 15 software development tasks and assessed Copilot's benefits through real-world projects on large proprietary code bases. Our findings indicate significant reductions in developer toil, with up to 50% time saved in code documentation and autocompletion, and 30-40% in repetitive coding tasks, unit test generation, debugging, and pair programming. However, Copilot struggles with complex tasks, large functions, multiple files, and proprietary contexts, particularly with C/C++ code. We project a 33-36% time reduction for coding-related tasks in a cloud-first software development lifecycle. This study aims to quantify productivity improvements, identify underperforming scenarios, examine practical benefits and challenges, investigate performance variations across programming languages, and discuss emerging issues related to code quality, security, and developer experience.