On the Variations and Evolutions of API Usage Patterns: Case Study on Android Applications
On the Variations and Evolutions of API Usage Patterns: Case Study on Android Applications
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DOI：
10.1145/3387940.3392203
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发表时间：
2020-06
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Koki Ogasawara;Tetsuya Kanda;Katsuro Inoue
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文献类型：
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作者：
Koki Ogasawara;Tetsuya Kanda;Katsuro Inoue
软件开发人员可以通过访问库应用程序编程接口（API）来调用已经提供的函数，从而降低实现成本。API经常组合使用，但如何将它们联合收割机并没有很好的文档记录。现有的研究主要集中在如何提取API使用模式或如何从现有软件中检测出API误用。这类研究可能会受到待分析数据集的影响，因此，提高挖掘结果并了解API使用模式的差异如何影响软件健康是重要的任务。我们分析了软件项目之间API使用模式的变化及其与Android SDK API和Android应用程序的版本历史。根据分析结果，我们对进一步的API分析提出了一些建议。例如，存在许多特定于项目的API使用模式和长期不常见的API使用模式，因此它们可能会影响挖掘结果或检查软件健康状态。
Software developers can reduce the implementation cost by calling already provided functions through accessing library Application Programming Interface (API). APIs are often used in combination but how to combine them are not well-documented. Existing researches focused on how to extract API usage patterns or how to detect API misuse from existing software. This kind of research might be affected by dataset to analyze, so to improve mining results and to understand how the difference of API usage patterns affect the software health are important tasks. We conducted an analysis on variations of API usage pattern among software projects and their version history with Android SDK APIs and Android applications. Based on our analysis results, we made some suggestions for further API analysis. For example, there are many project-specific API usage patterns and long-life uncommon API usage patterns so that they might affect the mining result or checking software health status.