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Main Authors: Caumartin, Genevieve, Qin, Qiaolin, Chatragadda, Sharon, Panjrolia, Janmitsinh, Li, Heng, Costa, Diego Elias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02789
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author Caumartin, Genevieve
Qin, Qiaolin
Chatragadda, Sharon
Panjrolia, Janmitsinh
Li, Heng
Costa, Diego Elias
author_facet Caumartin, Genevieve
Qin, Qiaolin
Chatragadda, Sharon
Panjrolia, Janmitsinh
Li, Heng
Costa, Diego Elias
contents Code reviews are an integral part of software development and have been recognized as a crucial practice for minimizing bugs and favouring higher code quality. They serve as an important checkpoint before committing code and play an essential role in knowledge transfer between developers. However, code reviews can be time-consuming and can stale the development of large software projects. In a recent study, Guo et al. assessed how ChatGPT3.5 can help the code review process. They evaluated the effectiveness of ChatGPT in automating the code refinement tasks, where developers recommend small changes in the submitted code. While Guo et al. 's study showed promising results, proprietary models like ChatGPT pose risks to data privacy and incur extra costs for software projects. In this study, we explore alternatives to ChatGPT in code refinement tasks by including two open-source, smaller-scale large language models: CodeLlama and Llama 2 (7B parameters). Our results show that, if properly tuned, the Llama models, particularly CodeLlama, can achieve reasonable performance, often comparable to ChatGPT in automated code refinement. However, not all code refinement tasks are equally successful: tasks that require changing existing code (e.g., refactoring) are more manageable for models to automate than tasks that demand new code. Our study highlights the potential of open-source models for code refinement, offering cost-effective, privacy-conscious solutions for real-world software development.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_02789
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring the Potential of Llama Models in Automated Code Refinement: A Replication Study
Caumartin, Genevieve
Qin, Qiaolin
Chatragadda, Sharon
Panjrolia, Janmitsinh
Li, Heng
Costa, Diego Elias
Software Engineering
Code reviews are an integral part of software development and have been recognized as a crucial practice for minimizing bugs and favouring higher code quality. They serve as an important checkpoint before committing code and play an essential role in knowledge transfer between developers. However, code reviews can be time-consuming and can stale the development of large software projects. In a recent study, Guo et al. assessed how ChatGPT3.5 can help the code review process. They evaluated the effectiveness of ChatGPT in automating the code refinement tasks, where developers recommend small changes in the submitted code. While Guo et al. 's study showed promising results, proprietary models like ChatGPT pose risks to data privacy and incur extra costs for software projects. In this study, we explore alternatives to ChatGPT in code refinement tasks by including two open-source, smaller-scale large language models: CodeLlama and Llama 2 (7B parameters). Our results show that, if properly tuned, the Llama models, particularly CodeLlama, can achieve reasonable performance, often comparable to ChatGPT in automated code refinement. However, not all code refinement tasks are equally successful: tasks that require changing existing code (e.g., refactoring) are more manageable for models to automate than tasks that demand new code. Our study highlights the potential of open-source models for code refinement, offering cost-effective, privacy-conscious solutions for real-world software development.
title Exploring the Potential of Llama Models in Automated Code Refinement: A Replication Study
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02789