Examining the Use and Impact of an AI Code Assistant on Developer Productivity and Experience in the Enterprise

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Weisz, Justin D., Kumar, Shraddha, Muller, Michael, Browne, Karen-Ellen, Goldberg, Arielle, Heintze, Ellice, Bajpai, Shagun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Weisz, Justin D.
Kumar, Shraddha
Muller, Michael
Browne, Karen-Ellen
Goldberg, Arielle
Heintze, Ellice
Bajpai, Shagun
author_facet Weisz, Justin D.
Kumar, Shraddha
Muller, Michael
Browne, Karen-Ellen
Goldberg, Arielle
Heintze, Ellice
Bajpai, Shagun
contents AI assistants are being created to help software engineers conduct a variety of coding-related tasks, such as writing, documenting, and testing code. We describe the use of the watsonx Code Assistant (WCA), an LLM-powered coding assistant deployed internally within IBM. Through surveys of two user cohorts (N=669) and unmoderated usability testing (N=15), we examined developers' experiences with WCA and its impact on their productivity. We learned about their motivations for using (or not using) WCA, we examined their expectations of its speed and quality, and we identified new considerations regarding ownership of and responsibility for generated code. Our case study characterizes the impact of an LLM-powered assistant on developers' perceptions of productivity and it shows that although such tools do often provide net productivity increases, these benefits may not always be experienced by all users.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_06603
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Examining the Use and Impact of an AI Code Assistant on Developer Productivity and Experience in the Enterprise
Weisz, Justin D.
Kumar, Shraddha
Muller, Michael
Browne, Karen-Ellen
Goldberg, Arielle
Heintze, Ellice
Bajpai, Shagun
Human-Computer Interaction
Software Engineering
AI assistants are being created to help software engineers conduct a variety of coding-related tasks, such as writing, documenting, and testing code. We describe the use of the watsonx Code Assistant (WCA), an LLM-powered coding assistant deployed internally within IBM. Through surveys of two user cohorts (N=669) and unmoderated usability testing (N=15), we examined developers' experiences with WCA and its impact on their productivity. We learned about their motivations for using (or not using) WCA, we examined their expectations of its speed and quality, and we identified new considerations regarding ownership of and responsibility for generated code. Our case study characterizes the impact of an LLM-powered assistant on developers' perceptions of productivity and it shows that although such tools do often provide net productivity increases, these benefits may not always be experienced by all users.
title Examining the Use and Impact of an AI Code Assistant on Developer Productivity and Experience in the Enterprise
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06603