To react, or not to react: Patterns of reaction to API deprecation

Application Programming Interfaces (API) provide reusable functionality to aid developers in the development process. The features provided by these APIs might change over time as the API evolves. To allow API consumers to peacefully transition from older obsolete features to new features, API producers make use of the deprecation mechanism...

fine-GRAPE: Fine-grained APi usage extractor – an approach and dataset to investigate API usage

An Application Programming Interface (API) provides a set of functionalities to a developer with the aim of enabling reuse. APIs have been investigated from different angles such as popularity usage and evolution to get a better understanding of their various characteristics. For such studies, software repositories are mined for API usage...

On the reaction to deprecation of clients of 4 + 1 popular Java APIs and the JDK

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a tremendous resource—that is, when they are stable. Several studies have shown that this is unfortunately not the case. Of those, a large-scale study of API changes in the Pharo Smalltalk ecosystem documented several findings about API deprecations and their impact on API clients. We extend this...

Measuring Library Stability Through Historical Version Analysis

Preprint of paper published in: ICSM 2012 - Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, 23-28 September 2012; doi:10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405296 Backward compatibility is a major concern for any library developer. In this paper, we evaluate how stable a set of frequently used third-party libraries is in terms of method...