Exposing behavioral differences in cross-language API mapping relations
FASE'13 Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering
API change and fault proneness: a threat to the success of Android apps
Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
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Reuse has significantly improved software productivity and quality. An application interacts with a reused system through its Application Programming Interfaces (API). To make the life of the application developer easier, it is desirable for the API to be both sufficiently powerful and stable. Unfortunately, in reality APIs inevitably change, to be more powerful or to remove design flaws. This may create additional work for the application developer to adapt to the changed API. Thus, to counter the negative impacts of API evolution, we need to study how and why APIs are evolved. To that end, we performed a detailed analysis of the evolution of a production API. In particular, we categorized the changes to the API according to its domain semantics and design intent. We discussed the implications of our findings for both API designers and application developers.