An Experience Report of the API Evolution and Maintenance for Software Platforms

Abstract

Development and maintenance of software plat-form APIs are challenging because new APIs are constantly added in new software platforms. Furthermore, software plat-form API development requires a lot of stakeholders to work together on tight release schedules. Application developers use platform's APIs to create their applications and therefore providing a well-defined and comprehensive set of platform APIs may be the most basic requirement for software platforms. To provide such APIs, API usability should be secured and API backward compatibility should be guaranteed in subsequent platform re-leases. In these circumstances, sharing lessons learned from multiple years of experience of platform API development, mainte-nance, and releases using an integrated API development process can benefit API researchers and practitioners who have similar needs to create or adopt API development process for their projects. In this paper we share an API development and mainte-nance process for multi-device Tizen software platform, which we call the Tizen API Change Request (ACR) process. The process has been used among various Tizen API stakeholders for several years of Tizen platform and SDK releases to keep API usability and compatibility high. We believe the process can be further applied to various software platforms and projects to systematically develop and maintain their APIs.