Paper Info
Title
Understanding API Usage to Support Informed Decision Making in Software Maintenance
Abstract
Reuse of third-party libraries promises significant productivity improvements in software development. However, dependencies on external libraries and their APIs also introduce risks to a project and impact strategic decisions during development and maintenance. Informed decision making therefore requires a thorough understanding of the extent and nature of dependencies on external APIs. As realistically sized applications are often heavily entangled with various external APIs, gaining this understanding is infeasible with manual inspections only. To address this, we present an automated approach to analyze the dependencies of software projects on external APIs. The approach is supported by a static analysis tool featuring a visualization of the analysis results. We evaluate the approach as well as the tooling on multiple open source Java systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/CSMR.2012.55
CSMR
Keywords
Field
DocType
software project,analysis result,various external apis,external apis,software development,thorough understanding,impact strategic decision,software maintenance,static analysis tool,understanding api usage,external library,automated approach,java,api,maintenance engineering,application program interface,data visualisation,library,static analysis tools,data visualization,visualization
Software engineering,Software analytics,Systems engineering,Computer science,Package development process,Software peer review,Software project management,Software development process,Software maintenance,Software visualization,Software development
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1944-2793
12
0.72
References 
Authors
5
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Veronika Bauer1927.48
Lars Heinemann220211.05