Code Suggestion of Method Call Statements Using a Source Code Corpus

When writing source code, developers often reuse existing source code or use libraries in order to effectively develop new software. We propose an approach to suggest method call statements to source code developers. In our study, we focus on method call statements in existing source code. A source code corpus is automatically constructed in advance from existing source code. The corpus stores method call statements before/after a method call statement. Appropriate method call statements are recommended to the developer from the corpus. We implement the proposed approach as an Eclipse plugin and clarify the effectiveness of the approach through evaluations. The evaluation results show that appropriate method call statements are ranked highly in the candidate list.