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Seeking the ground truth: a retroactive study on the evolution and migration of software libraries

Authors:

Bradley E. Cossette,

Robert J. WalkerAuthors Info & Claims

FSE '12: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Article No.: 55, Pages 1 - 11

https://doi.org/10.1145/2393596.2393661

Published: 11 November 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are a common and industrially-relevant means for third-party software developers to reuse external functionality. Several techniques have been proposed to help migrate client code between library versions with incompatible APIs, but it is not clear how well these perform in an absolute sense. We present a retroactive study into the presence and nature of API incompatibilities between several versions of a set of Java-based software libraries; for each, we perform a detailed, manual analysis to determine what the correct adaptations are to migrate from the older to the newer version. In addition, we investigate whether any of a set of adaptation recommender techniques is capable of identifying the correct adaptations for library migration. We find that a given API incompatibility can typically be addressed by only one or two recommender techniques, but sometimes none serve. Furthermore, those techniques give correct recommendations, on average, in only about 20% of cases.

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Cited By

Carvalho PBonifácio RLucas WMota A(2024)Mining Discussions on Software Migration: A study of the Boost mailing list regarding C++ code evolutionProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3701625.3701665(264-274)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3701625.3701665
Menon HNichols DBhatele AGamblin TSpinellis DConstantinou EBacchelli A(2024)Learning to Predict and Improve Build Successes in Package EcosystemsProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3643991.3644927(531-542)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643991.3644927
Zhong HMeng NRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Compiler-directed Migrating API Callsite of Client CodeProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639084(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639084
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Seeking the ground truth: a retroactive study on the evolution and migration of software libraries
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

FSE '12: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 2012

494 pages

ISBN:9781450316149

DOI:10.1145/2393596

General Chair:
Will Tracz
Lockheed Martin Fellow Emeritus
,
Program Chairs:
Martin Robillard
McGill University
,
Tevfik Bultan
University of California, Santa Barbara

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 November 2012

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SIGSOFT

SIGSOFT/FSE'12: 20th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 11 - 16, 2012

North Carolina, Cary

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Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 128 submissions, 13%

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Cited By

Carvalho PBonifácio RLucas WMota A(2024)Mining Discussions on Software Migration: A study of the Boost mailing list regarding C++ code evolutionProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3701625.3701665(264-274)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3701625.3701665
Menon HNichols DBhatele AGamblin TSpinellis DConstantinou EBacchelli A(2024)Learning to Predict and Improve Build Successes in Package EcosystemsProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3643991.3644927(531-542)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643991.3644927
Zhong HMeng NRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Compiler-directed Migrating API Callsite of Client CodeProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639084(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639084
Hasan MTsantalis NAlikhanifard P(2024)Refactoring-aware Block Tracking in Commit HistoryIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.3484586(1-20)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2024.3484586
Nichols DMenon HGamblin TBhatele A(2024)A Probabilistic Approach To Selecting Build Configurations in Package ManagersSC24: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis10.1109/SC41406.2024.00090(1-13)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SC41406.2024.00090
Pomian DBellur ADilhara MKurbatova ZBogomolov EBryksin TDig D(2024)Next-Generation Refactoring: Combining LLM Insights and IDE Capabilities for Extract Method2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME58944.2024.00034(275-287)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME58944.2024.00034
Mahmoud MWalker RDenzinger J(2024)API usage templates via structural generalizationJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.111974210:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2024.111974
Liu MYang YLou YPeng XZhou ZDu XYang TChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)Recommending Analogical APIs via Knowledge Graph EmbeddingProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616305(1496-1508)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
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Miller CKästner CVasilescu BChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)“We Feel Like We’re Winging It:” A Study on Navigating Open-Source Dependency AbandonmentProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616293(1281-1293)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
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He RHe HZhang YZhou M(2023)Automating Dependency Updates in Practice: An Exploratory Study on GitHub DependabotIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.3278129(1-18)Online publication date: 2023
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