SemDiff: Analysis and recommendation support for API evolution

  • Authors:
  • Barthelemy Dagenais;Martin P. Robillard

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada;School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

As a framework evolves, changes in its Application Programming Interface (API) can break client programs that extend the framework. Repairing a client program can be a challenging task because developers need to understand the context surrounding the API change. This paper describes SemDiff, a tool that recommends replacements for framework methods that were accessed by a client program and deleted during the evolution of the framework. SemDiff recommends replacements for non-trivial changes undiscovered by other change-detection techniques and also enables developers to look at the context of the changes that led to the deletion of a framework method.