nach oben

Empirical Software Engineering

Erschienen in:

29.11.2019

You broke my code: understanding the motivations for breaking changes in APIs

verfasst von: Aline Brito, Marco Tulio Valente, Laerte Xavier, Andre Hora

Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering | Ausgabe 2/2020

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

As most software systems, libraries and frameworks also evolve, which may break existing clients. However, the main reasons to introduce breaking changes in APIs are unclear. Therefore, in this paper, we first report the results of an almost 4-month long field study with popular Java libraries and frameworks. We configured an infrastructure to observe all changes in these libraries and to detect breaking changes shortly after their introduction in the code. We detected possible breaking changes in 61 projects. After identifying breaking changes, we asked the developers to explain the reasons behind their decision to change the APIs. By analyzing the developers’ answers, we report that breaking changes are mostly motivated by the need to implement new features, by the desire to make the APIs simpler and with fewer elements, and to improve maintainability. To complement this first study, we describe a second study, including the analysis of 110 Stack Overflow posts related to breaking changes. We reveal that breaking changes have an important impact on clients, since 45% of the questions are from clients asking how to overcome specific breaking changes; they are also common in other ecosystems—JavaScript, .NET, etc. We conclude by providing suggestions to language designers, tool builders, software engineering researchers, and API developers.

Vorheriger Artikel How developers engage with static analysis tools in different contexts

Nächster Artikel CAPS: a supervised technique for classifying Stack Overflow posts concerning API issues

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

https://search.maven.org/stats

Currently, apidiff does not detect breaking changes in annotations. Instead, these breaking changes are reported in the fields of the interfaces defining an annotation.

https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/commit/3eede16

https://github.com/facebook/fresco/commit/f6fe6c3

Most cases refer to internal or low-level API (34 occurrences) and one is an accidental change.

In the case of fields, breaking changes occur mainly when changing the type or default value of a public field (or when removing it).

https://stackoverflow.com/company

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/closed-questions

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35233989

https://data.stackexchange.com/help

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8929130

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15543841

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48854954

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1456785

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19638981

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2678744

The users profile are unclear in 8 questions classified as general discussions.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35993598

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32442605

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32151603#32151901

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45725330#45743449

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12137939

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27243

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8279299

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19315263

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30300279

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39533030

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38985159

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44642302

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1456785

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19614954

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19638981

https://github.com/siom79/japicmp

https://github.com/aserg-ufmg/apidiff

Abdeen H, Ducasse S, Sahraoui H, Alloui I (2009) Automatic package coupling and cycle minimization. In: 16th working conference on reverse engineering (WCRE), pp 103–112

Ahasanuzzaman M, Asaduzzaman M, Roy CK, Schneider KA (2018) Classifying Stack Overflow posts on API issues. In: 25th international conference on software analysis, evolution and reengineering (SANER), pp 244–254

Anquetil N, Lethbridge TC (1999) Experiments with clustering as a software remodularization method. In: 6th working conference on reverse engineering (WCRE), pp 235–255

Bajaj K, Pattabiraman K, Mesbah A (2014) Mining questions asked by web developers. In: 11th working conference on mining software repositories (MSR), pp 112–121

Barua A, Thomas SW, Hassan AE (2014) What are developers talking about? an analysis of topics and trends in Stack Overflow. Empirical Software Engineering 619–654CrossRef

Beyer S, Macho C, Pinzger M, Penta MD (2018) Automatically classifying posts into question categories on Stack Overflow. In: 26th conference on program comprehension (ICPC), pp 211–221

Bogart C, Kästner C, Herbsleb J, Thung F (2016) How to break an API: cost negotiation and community values in three software ecosystems. In: 24th international symposium on the foundations of software engineering (FSE), pp 109–120

Borges H, Hora A, Valente MT (2016) Understanding the factors that impact the popularity of GitHub repositories. In: 32nd IEEE international conference on software maintenance and evolution (ICSME), pp 334–344

Boulanger JS, Robillard MP (2006) Managing concern interfaces. In: 22nd IEEE international conference on software maintenance (ICSME), pp 14–23

Brito A, Xavier L, Hora A, Valente MT (2018a) APIDiff: Detecting API breaking changes. In: 25th international conference on software analysis, evolution and reengineering (SANER), tool track, pp 507–511

Brito A, Xavier L, Hora A, Valente MT (2018b) Why and how Java developers break APIs. In: 25th international conference on software analysis, evolution and reengineering (SANER), pp 255–265

Businge J, Serebrenik A, van den Brand M (2012) Survival of Eclipse third-party plug-ins. In: 28th IEEE international conference on software maintenance (ICSM), pp 368–377

Businge J, Serebrenik A, van den Brand M (2013) Analyzing the eclipse API usage: Putting the developer in the loop. In: 17th european conference on software maintenance and reengineering (CSMR), pp 37–46

Businge J, Serebrenik A, van den Brand MGJ (2015) Eclipse API usage: the good and the bad. Softw Qual J 23(1):107–141CrossRef

Chow K, Notkin D (1996) Semi-automatic update of applications in response to library changes. In: 12th international conference on software maintenance (ICSM), pp 359–368

Cliff N (2014) Ordinal methods for behavioral data analysis. Psychology Press

Cruzes DS, Dyba T (2011) Recommended steps for thematic synthesis in software engineering. In: 5th international symposium on empirical software engineering and measurement (ESEM), pp 275–284

Dagenais B, Robillard MP (2008) Recommending adaptive changes for framework evolution. In: 30th international conference on software engineering (ICSE), pp 481–490

Dig D, Johnson R (2005) How do APIs evolve? a story of refactoring. In: 22nd international conference on software maintenance (ICSM), pp 83–107CrossRef

Dyer R, Nguyen HA, Rajan H, Nguyen TN (2013) Boa: a language and infrastructure for analyzing ultra-large-scale software repositories. In: 35th international conference on software engineering (ICSE), pp 422–431

Henkel J, Diwan A (2005) Catchup!: Capturing and replaying refactorings to support API evolution. In: 27th international conference on software engineering (ICSE), pp 274–283

Hora A, Robbes R, Valente MT, Anquetil N, Etien A, Ducasse S (2018) How do developers react to API evolution? a large-scale empirical study. Softw Qual J 26(1):161–191CrossRef

Hora A, Valente MT, Robbes R, Anquetil N (2016) When should internal interfaces be promoted to public?. In: 24th international symposium on the foundations of software engineering (FSE), pp 280–291

Jezek K, Dietrich J, Brada P (2015) How Java APIs break - an empirical study. Inf Softw Technol 65(C):129–146CrossRef

Kim M, Notkin D (2009) Discovering and representing systematic code changes. In: 31st international conference on software engineering (ICSE), pp 309–319

Konstantopoulos D, Marien J, Pinkerton M, Braude E (2009) Best principles in the design of shared software. In: 33rd international computer software and applications conference (COMPSAC), pp 287–292

Kula RG, Ouni A, German DM, Inoue K (2018) An empirical study on the impact of refactoring activities on evolving client-used APIs. Inf Softw Technol 93 (C):186–199CrossRef

Mastrangelo L, Ponzanelli L, Mocci A, Lanza M, Hauswirth M, Nystrom N (2015) Use at your own risk: the Java unsafe API in the wild. In: 30th international conference on object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (OOPSLA), pp 695–710CrossRef

Mazinanian D, Ketkar A, Tsantalis N, Dig D (2017) Understanding the use of lambda expressions in Java. In: 32nd international conference on object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (OOPSLA), pp 85:1–85:31CrossRef

McDonnell T, Ray B, Kim M (2013) An empirical study of API stability and adoption in the Android ecosystem. In: 29Th international conference on software maintenance (ICSM), pp 70–79

Meng S, Wang X, Zhang L, Mei H (2012) A history-based matching approach to identification of framework evolution. In: 34th international conference on software engineering (ICSE), pp 353–363

Mezzetti G, Møller A, Torp MT (2018) Type regression testing to detect breaking changes in Node.js libraries. In: 32nd european conference on object-oriented programming (ECOOP), pp 7:1–7:24

Mitchell BS, Mancoridis S (2006) On the automatic modularization of software systems using the Bunch tool. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 32(3):193–208CrossRef

Morrison P, Murphy-Hill E (2013) Is programming knowledge related to age? an exploration of Stack Overflow. In: 10th working conference on mining software repositories (MSR), pp 69–72

Moser S, Nierstrasz O (1996) The effect of object-oriented frameworks on developer productivity. Computer 29(9):45–51CrossRef

Mostafa S, Rodriguez R, Wang X (2017) Experience paper: a study on behavioral backward incompatibilities of Java software libraries. In: 26th international symposium on software testing and analysis (ISSTA), pp 215–225

Murphy-Hill E, Zimmermann T, Bird C, Nagappan N (2013) The design of bug fixes. In: 35th international conference on software engineerin (ICSE), pp 332–341

Murphy-Hill E, Zimmermann T, Bird C, Nagappan N (2015) The design space of bug fixes and how developers navigate it. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 41(1):65–81CrossRef

Nguyen HA, Nguyen TT Jr, GW, Nguyen AT, Kim M, Nguyen TN (2010) A graph-based approach to API usage adaptation. In: 25th international conference on object oriented programming systems languages and applications (OOPSLA), pp 302–321

Pinto G, Castor F, Liu YD (2014) Mining questions about software energy consumption. In: Working conference on mining software repositories (MSR), pp 22–31

Pinto G, Castor F, Liu YD (2014) Mining questions about software energy consumption. In: 11th working conference on mining software repositories (MSR), pp 22–31

Praditwong K, Harman M, Yao X (2011) Software module clustering as a multi-objective search problem. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 37(2):264–282CrossRef

Prete K, Rachatasumrit N, Sudan N, Kim M (2010) Template-based reconstruction of complex refactorings. In: 26th international conference on software maintenance (ICSM), pp 1–10

Raemaekers S, van Deursen A, Visser J (2012) Measuring software library stability through historical version analysis. In: 28th international conference on software maintenance (ICSM), pp 378–387

Reddy M (2011) API Design for c++. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Mateo

Robbes R, Lungu M, Röthlisberger D (2012) How do developers react to API deprecation? the case of a Smalltalk ecosystem. In: 20Th international symposium on the foundations of software engineering (FSE), pp 56:1–56:11

Rogers EM (2003) Diffusion of innovations, 5th edn. Free Press, New York

Sawant AA, Robbes R, Bacchelli A (2016) On the reaction to deprecation of 25,357 clients of 4 + 1 popular Java APIs. In: 32nd international conference on software maintenance and evolution (ICSME), pp 400–410

Sawant AA, Robbes R, Bacchelli A (2017) On the reaction to deprecation of clients of 4 + 1 popular Java APIs and the JDK. Empir Softw Eng 1–40

Schäfer T, Jonas J, Mezini M (2008) Mining framework usage changes from instantiation code. In: 30Th international conference on software engineering (ICSE), pp 471–480

Silva D, Tsantalis N, Valente MT (2016) Why we refactor? confessions of GitHub contributors. In: 24th international symposium on the foundations of software engineering (FSE), pp 858–870

Terra R, Valente MT, Czarnecki K, Bigonha RS (2015) A recommendation system for repairing violations detected by static architecture conformance checking. Software: Practice and Experience 45(3):315–342

Wang W, Malik H, Godfrey M (2015) Recommending posts concerning API issues in developer Q&A sites. In: 12Th working conference on mining software repositories (MSR), pp 224–234

Wu W, Gueheneuc YG, Antoniol G, Kim M (2010) AURA: A hybrid approach to identify framework evolution. In: 32nd international conference on software engineering (ICSE), pp 325–334

Xavier L, Brito A, Hora A, Valente MT (2017a) Historical and impact analysis of API breaking changes: a large scale study. In: 24th international conference on software analysis, evolution and reengineering (SANER), pp 138–147

Xavier L, Hora A, Valente MT (2017b) Why do we break APIs? first answers from developers. In: 24th international conference on software analysis, evolution and reengineering (SANER), pp 392–396

Zhang T, Upadhyaya G, Reinhardt A, Rajan H, Kim M (2018) Are code examples on an online Q&A forum reliable? a study of API misuse on stack overflow. In: 40Th international conference on software engineering (ICSE), pp 886–896

Titel: You broke my code: understanding the motivations for breaking changes in APIs
verfasst von: Aline Brito
Marco Tulio Valente
Laerte Xavier
Andre Hora
Publikationsdatum: 29.11.2019
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering / Ausgabe 2/2020
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09756-z

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 2/2020

Cross-version defect prediction: use historical data, cross-project data, or both?

Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering

How bugs are born: a model to identify how bugs are introduced in software components

An empirical characterization of bad practices in continuous integration

An experimental scrutiny of visual design modelling: VCL up against UML+OCL

Meshing agile and plan-driven development in safety-critical software: a case study