Predicting Developers' IDE Commands with Machine Learning

Abstract: When a developer is writing code they are usually focused and in a state-of-mind which some refer to as flow. Breaking out of this flow can cause the developer to lose their train of thought and have to start their thought process from the beginning. This loss of thought can be caused by interruptions and sometimes slow IDE interactions. Predictive functionality has been harnessed in user applications to speed up load times, such as in Google Chrome's browser which has a feature called "Predicting Network Actions". This will pre-load web-pages that the user is most likely to click through. This mitigates the interruption that load times can introduce. In this paper we seek to make the first step towards predicting user commands in the IDE. Using the MSR 2018 Challenge Data of over 3000 developer session and over 10 million recorded events, we analyze and cleanse the data to be parsed into event series, which can then be used to train a variety of machine learning models, including a neural network, to predict user induced commands. Our highest performing model is able to obtain a 5 cross-fold validation prediction accuracy of 64%.