TY - GEN
T1 - Characterising deprecated Android APIs
AU - Li, Li
AU - Gao, Jun
AU - Bissyandé, Tegawendé F.
AU - Ma, Lei
AU - Xia, Xin
AU - Klein, Jacques
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 ACM.
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/5/28
Y1 - 2018/5/28
N2 - Because of functionality evolution, or security and performance-related changes, some APIs eventually become unnecessary in a software system and thus need to be cleaned to ensure proper maintainability. Those APIs are typically marked first as deprecated APIs and, as recommended, follow through a deprecated-replaceremove cycle, giving an opportunity to client application developers to smoothly adapt their code in next updates. Such a mechanism is adopted in the Android framework development where thousands of reusable APIs are made available to Android app developers. In this work, we present a research-based prototype tool called CDA and apply it to different revisions (i.e., releases or tags) of the Android framework code for characterising deprecated APIs. Based on the data mined by CDA, we then perform an exploratory study on API deprecation in the Android ecosystem and the associated challenges for maintaining quality apps. In particular, we investigate the prevalence of deprecated APIs, their annotations and documentation, their removal and consequences, their replacement messages, as well as developer reactions to API deprecation. Experimental results reveal several findings that further provide promising insights for future research directions related to deprecated Android APIs. Notably, by mining the source code of the Android framework base, we have identified three bugs related to deprecated APIs. These bugs have been quickly assigned and positively appreciated by the framework maintainers, who claim that these issues will be updated in future releases.
AB - Because of functionality evolution, or security and performance-related changes, some APIs eventually become unnecessary in a software system and thus need to be cleaned to ensure proper maintainability. Those APIs are typically marked first as deprecated APIs and, as recommended, follow through a deprecated-replaceremove cycle, giving an opportunity to client application developers to smoothly adapt their code in next updates. Such a mechanism is adopted in the Android framework development where thousands of reusable APIs are made available to Android app developers. In this work, we present a research-based prototype tool called CDA and apply it to different revisions (i.e., releases or tags) of the Android framework code for characterising deprecated APIs. Based on the data mined by CDA, we then perform an exploratory study on API deprecation in the Android ecosystem and the associated challenges for maintaining quality apps. In particular, we investigate the prevalence of deprecated APIs, their annotations and documentation, their removal and consequences, their replacement messages, as well as developer reactions to API deprecation. Experimental results reveal several findings that further provide promising insights for future research directions related to deprecated Android APIs. Notably, by mining the source code of the Android framework base, we have identified three bugs related to deprecated APIs. These bugs have been quickly assigned and positively appreciated by the framework maintainers, who claim that these issues will be updated in future releases.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85051493131&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85051493131&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3196398.3196419
DO - 10.1145/3196398.3196419
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85051493131
SN - 9781450357166
T3 - Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
SP - 254
EP - 264
BT - Proceedings - 2018 ACM/IEEE 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2018
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2018, co-located with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2018
Y2 - 28 May 2018 through 29 May 2018
ER -