The impact of API evolution on API consumers and how this can be affected by API producers and language designers

The practice of software engineering involves the combination of existing software components with new functionality to create new software. This is where an Application Programming Interface (API) comes in, an API is a definition of a set of functionality that can be reused by a developer to incorporate certain functionality in their codebase....

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...

Why are features deprecated?: An investigation into the motivation behind deprecation

In this study, we investigate why API producers deprecate features. Previous work has shown us that knowing the rationale behind deprecation of an API aids a consumer in deciding to react, thus hinting at a diversity of deprecation reasons. We manually analyze the Javadoc of 374 deprecated methods pertaining four mainstream Java APIs to see...

Understanding Developers' Needs on Deprecation as a Language Feature

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...

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...

Visualizing code and coverage changes for code review

One of the tasks of reviewers is to verify that code modifications are well tested. However, current tools offer little support in understanding precisely how changes to the code relate to changes to the tests. In particular, it is hard to see whether (modified) test code covers the changed code. To mitigate this problem, we developed OPERIAS...

On the Reaction to Deprecation of 25,357 Clients of 4+1 Popular Java APIs

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<br/>ecosystem documented several findings about API deprecations and their impact on API clients. We conduct a...