A Mining-Software-Repository study on deprecated API usages in open-source Java software applications

IF 4.3 2区计算机科学 Q2 COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Information and Software Technology Pub Date : 2025-06-07 DOI:10.1016/j.infsof.2025.107782

Pietro Cassieri, Simone Romano, Giuseppe Scanniello

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Context:

A deprecated API (Application Programming Interface) is an API that its original developers no longer recommend using. Although deprecated APIs (i.e., deprecated fields, methods, and classes) are still implemented, they are likely to be removed in future implementations. Consequently, developers are advised against using deprecated APIs in newly written code and are encouraged to update existing code to remove any deprecated API usage.

Objective:

We aimed to gather preliminary empirical evidence on deprecated API usages in open-source Java applications.

Methods:

To pursue such a goal, we conducted an exploratory Mining-Software-Repository (MSR) study in which we quantitatively analyzed the commit histories of 14 applications whose software projects were top-starred on GitHub.

Results:

The most important takeaway results of our study can be summarized as follows: (i) deprecated API usages are pretty widespread in the studied software applications; (ii) only in half of these applications, developers remove deprecated API usages as soon as possible; (iii) consuming their own deprecated APIs is a prevalent phenomenon in half of the studied applications; (iv) the introductions and removals of deprecated API usages are mostly due to changes performed by senior contributors; (v) developers mostly introduce and remove deprecated API usages when they are far from publishing a release version; and (vi) the introductions and removals of deprecated API usages are often undocumented in commit messages.

Conclusion:

The outcomes of our study suggest that developers should better handle deprecated API usages.

查看原文本刊更多论文

开源Java软件应用程序中废弃API用法的挖掘软件存储库研究

上下文：已弃用的API（应用程序编程接口）是其原始开发人员不再推荐使用的API。尽管已弃用的api（即，已弃用的字段、方法和类）仍在实现，但它们很可能在未来的实现中被删除。因此，建议开发人员不要在新编写的代码中使用不推荐的API，并鼓励更新现有代码以删除任何不推荐的API用法。目的：我们旨在收集开源Java应用程序中不推荐的API用法的初步经验证据。方法：为了实现这一目标，我们进行了一项探索性的挖掘软件存储库（MSR）研究，在该研究中，我们定量分析了14个应用程序的提交历史，这些应用程序的软件项目在GitHub上获得了最高星级。结果：我们研究的最重要的收获结果可以总结如下：(i)在研究的软件应用程序中，不推荐的API用法相当普遍；（ii）只有在一半的应用程序中，开发人员会尽快删除已弃用的API用法；（iii）在一半的研究应用程序中，使用他们自己弃用的api是一个普遍现象；（iv）已弃用的API用法的引入和删除主要是由于高级贡献者进行的更改；(v)开发人员在离发布发布版本还很远的时候，大多会引入和删除不推荐的API用法；（vi）在提交消息中，不推荐的API用法的引入和删除通常没有记录。结论：我们的研究结果表明，开发人员应该更好地处理废弃的API用法。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Information and Software Technology 工程技术-计算机：软件工程

CiteScore

9.10

自引率

7.70%

发文量

164

审稿时长

9.6 weeks

期刊介绍： Information and Software Technology is the international archival journal focusing on research and experience that contributes to the improvement of software development practices. The journal''s scope includes methods and techniques to better engineer software and manage its development. Articles submitted for review should have a clear component of software engineering or address ways to improve the engineering and management of software development. Areas covered by the journal include: • Software management, quality and metrics, • Software processes, • Software architecture, modelling, specification, design and programming • Functional and non-functional software requirements • Software testing and verification & validation • Empirical studies of all aspects of engineering and managing software development Short Communications is a new section dedicated to short papers addressing new ideas, controversial opinions, "Negative" results and much more. Read the Guide for authors for more information. The journal encourages and welcomes submissions of systematic literature studies (reviews and maps) within the scope of the journal. Information and Software Technology is the premiere outlet for systematic literature studies in software engineering.