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API Document Quality for Resolving Deprecated APIs

Authors: Deokyoon Ko; Kyeongwook Ma; Sooyong Park; Suntae Kim; Dongsun Kim 0001; Yves Le Traon;

API Document Quality for Resolving Deprecated APIs

Abstract

Using deprecated APIs often results in security vulnerability or performance degradation. Thus, invocations to deprecated APIs should be immediately replaced by alternative APIs. To resolve deprecated APIs, most developers rely on API documents provided by service API libraries. However, the documents often do not have sufficient information. This makes many deprecated API usages remain unresolved, which leads programs to vulnerable states. This paper reports a result of studying document quality for deprecated APIs. We first collected 260 deprecated APIs of eight Java libraries as well as the corresponding API documents. These documents were manually investigated to figure out whether it provides alternative APIs, rationales, or examples. Then, we examined 2,126 API usages in 249 client applications and figured out whether those were resolved in the subsequent versions. This study revealed that 1) 3.6 APIs was deprecated and 3.6 deprecated APIs are removed from the library a month on average, 2) only 61% of API documents provided alternative APIs while rationale and examples were rarely documented, and 3) 62% of deprecate API usages in client applications were resolved if the corresponding API documents provided alternative APIs while 49% were resolved when the documents provided no alternative APIs. Based on these results, we draw future directions to encourage resolving deprecated APIs.

Country
Luxembourg
Related Organizations
Keywords

Sciences informatiques, Computer science, Engineering, computing & technology, Ingénierie, informatique & technologie

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    14
    popularity
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    Top 10%
    influence
    This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    Top 10%
    impulse
    This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
14
Top 10%
Top 10%
Average
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