3/10/2014

IEEE Xplore Abstract - Temporal analysis of API usage concepts

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Temporal analysis of API usage

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Uddin, G. ; Sch. of Comput. Sci., McGill Univ., Montral, QC, Canada ; Dagenais, B. ; Robillard, M.P.

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Software reuse through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is an integral part of software
development. The functionality offered by an API is not always accessed uniformly throughout the
lifetime of a client program. We propose Temporal API Usage Pattern Mining to detect API usage
patterns in terms of their time of introduction into client programs. We detect concepts as distinct
groups of API functionality from the change history of a client program. We locate those concepts in the
client change history and detect temporal usage patterns, where a pattern contains a set of concepts
that were added into the client program in a specific temporal order. We investigated the properties of
temporal API usage patterns through a multiple-case study of three APIs and their use in up to 19 client
software projects. Our technique was able to detect a number of valuable patterns in two out of three of
the APIs investigated. Further investigation showed some patterns to be relatively consistent between
clients, produced by multiple developers, and not trivially derivable from program structure or API

documentation.

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Published in:
Software Engineering (ICSE), 2012 34th International Conference on
Date of Conference:
2-9 June 2012
Page(s):
804 - 814

Conference Location :
Zurich

ISSN :
0270-5257

Digital Object Identifier :

10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227138

E-ISBN :
978-1-4673-1065-9
Print ISBN:
978-1-4673-1066-6
INSPEC Accession Number:
12847691

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IEEE Xplore Abstract - Temporal analysis of API usage concepts

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