Temporal code completion and navigation

Abstract

Modern IDEs make many software engineering tasks easier by automating functionality such as code completion and navigation. However, this functionality operates on one version of the code at a time. We envision a new approach that makes code completion and navigation aware of code evolution and enables them to operate on multiple versions at a time, without having to manually switch across these versions. We illustrate our approach on several example scenarios. We also describe a prototype Eclipse plugin that embodies our approach for code completion and navigation for Java code. We believe our approach opens a new line of research that adds a novel, temporal dimension for treating code in IDEs in the context of tasks that previously required manual switching across different code versions.