Understanding Developers' Needs on Deprecation as a Language Feature

Title

Understanding Developers' Needs on Deprecation as a Language Feature

 Author

Sawant, A.A. (TU Delft Software Engineering) ORCID 0000-0002-5816-8020
Aniche, Maurício (TU Delft Software Engineering) ORCID 0000-0002-8893-2835
van Deursen, A. (TU Delft Software Technology) ORCID 0000-0003-4850-3312
Bacchelli, A. (University of Zürich) ORCID 0000-0003-0193-6823

 Department

Software Technology

 Date

2018

 Abstract

Deprecation is a language feature that allows API producers to mark a feature as obsolete. We aim to gain a deep understanding of the needs of API producers and consumers alike regarding deprecation. To that end, we investigate why API producers deprecate features, whether they remove deprecated features, how they expect consumers to react, and what prompts an API consumer to react to deprecation. To achieve this goal we conduct semi-structured interviews with 17 third-party Java API producers and survey 170 Java developers. We observe that the current deprecation mechanism in Java and the proposal to enhance it does not address all the needs of a developer. This leads us to propose and evaluate three further enhancements to the deprecation mechanism.

 Subject

API
deprecation
Java

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f7a10177-82fa-4b23-ae4b-090fc9502fc9

 Publisher

Association for Computer Machinery, New York

 ISBN

978-1-4503-5638-1

 Source

ICSE' 18 Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

 Event

ICSE 2018, 2018-05-27 → 2018-06-03, Gothenburg, Sweden

 Part of collection

Institutional Repository

 Document type

conference paper

 Rights

© 2018 A.A. Sawant, Maurício Aniche, A. van Deursen, A. Bacchelli
Files
PDF deprecation_interview.pdf 1.17 MB
Close viewer