Visualizing the Evolution of Systems and Their Library Dependencies

Kula, Raula Gaikovina; Roover, Coen De; Germán, Daniel M.; Ishio, Takashi; Inoue, Katsuro

doi:10.1109/vissoft.2014.29

Cited by 44 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Overall, it is our hope that our large database of API method invocations and annotation usages will trigger even more precise and reproducible work in relation to software APIs; for example to be used in conjunction with tools to visualize how systems and their library dependencies evolve (Kula et al 2014), allowing a finer grained analysis.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Sawant

Bacchelli

2016

Empir Software Eng

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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 examples. However, many of the mining algorithms used for such purposes do not take type information into account. Thus making the results unreliable. In this paper, we aim to rectify this by introducing fine-GRAPE, an approach that produces fine-grained API usage information by taking advantage of type information while mining API method invocations and annotation. By means of fine-GRAPE, we investigate API usages from Java projects hosted on GitHub. We select five of the most popular APIs across GitHub Java projects and collect historical API usage information by mining both the release history of these APIs and the code history of every project that uses them. We perform two case studies on the resulting dataset. The first measures the lag time of each client. The second investigates the percentage of used API features. In the first case we find that for APIs that release more frequently clients are far less likely to upgrade to a more recent version of the API as opposed to clients of APIs that release infrequently. The second case study shows us that for most APIs there is a small number of features that is actually used and most of these features relate to those that have been introduced early in the APIs lifecycle.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Sawant

Bacchelli

2016

Empir Software Eng

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Adopting a new version of a library may seem a simple task, but have many difficulties [5]. Knowledge about a system's past upgrade activity with respect to a library can help maintainers [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To analyze library update activity, Kula et al [6] proposed a visualization technique using configuration files for a dependency management system. On the other hand, there exists no appropriate tool to understand library update activity of a project using clone-and-own approach.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extraction of Library Update History Using Source Code Reuse Detection

Jewmaidang

Ishio

Ihara

et al. 2018

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Another set of research use the API usage as a measure of stability or popularity [39,40]. Our previous work [41], among work leveraged popularity to recommend when libraries are deemed safe to use by the masses. Other related work that studied the impact of API evolution on their clients on online forums such as Stack Overflow [42] and the Android App [43], Pharo [44] and Smalltalk ecosystems [45].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirical study on the impact of refactoring activities on evolving client-used APIs

Kula

Ouni

Germán

et al. 2018

Information and Software Technology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts client users by breaking an API of the library. Objective: Our work aims to understand how clients that use a library API are affected by refactoring activities. We target popular libraries that potentially impact more library client users. Method: We distinguish between library APIs based on their client-usage (refereed to as client-used APIs) in order to understand the extent to which API breakages relate to refactorings. Our tool-based approach allows for a large-scale study across eight libraries (i.e., totaling 183 consecutive versions) with around 900 clients projects. Results: We find that library maintainers are less likely to break client-used API classes. Quantitatively, we find that refactoring activities break less than 37% of all client-used APIs. In a more qualitative analysis, we show two documented cases of where non-refactoring API breaking changes are motivated by other maintenance issues (i.e., bug fix and new features) and involve more complex refactoring operations. Conclusion: Using our automated approach, we find that library developers are less likely to break APIs and tend to break client-used APIs when addressing these maintenance issues.

show abstract

Visualizing the Evolution of Systems and Their Library Dependencies

Cited by 44 publications

References 20 publications

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

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

Extraction of Library Update History Using Source Code Reuse Detection

An empirical study on the impact of refactoring activities on evolving client-used APIs

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About