APIEvolutionMiner: Keeping API evolution under control

Abstract

During software evolution, source code is constantly refactored. In real-world migrations, many methods in the newer version are not present in the old version (e.g.,60% of the methods in Eclipse 2.0 were not in version 1.0). This requires changes to be consistently applied to reflect the new API and avoid further maintenance problems. In this paper, we propose a tool to extract rules by monitoring API changes applied in source code during system evolution. In this process, changes are mined at revision level in code history. Our tool focuses on mining invocation changes to keep track of how they are evolving. We also provide three case studies in order to evaluate the tool.