How Do Software Developers Use ChatGPT? An Exploratory Study on GitHub Pull Requests
Published in 2024 IEEE/ACM 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2024
Recommended citation: Chouchen, M., Bessghaier, N., Begoug, M., Ouni, A., AlOmar, E. A., & Mkaouer, M. W. (2024, April). How Do So ware Developers Use ChatGPT? An Exploratory Study on GitHub Pull Requests. In 2024 IEEE/ACM 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) (pp. 212-216). IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=10555786
ChatGPT is a cutting-edge tool for providing recommendations and solutions for developers in their pull requests (PRs). However, little is known about the characteristics of PRs that incorporate ChatGPT compared to those without it and what developers usually use it for. To this end, we quantitatively analyzed 243 PRs that listed at least one ChatGPT prompt against a representative sample of 384 PRs without any ChatGPT prompts. Furthermore, we perform a qualitative analysis to build a taxonomy of the topics developers primarily address in their prompts.