Creating Application Programming Interface Code Templates from Usage Patterns

Application programing interfaces promote reuse by facilitating interaction between software components and/or software libraries. API code templates are parameterized API scenarios that can be quickly instantiated by copy-and-pasting or through support from integrated development environments. They provide the skeletal structure of an API coding scenario and let developers simply “fill in the blanks” with the details of their coding task. Unfortunately, creating relevant API code templates requires time and experience with the API. To address these problems we present a technique that mines API usage patterns and transforms them into API code templates. Our intuition is that API usage patterns are a solid basis for code templates because they are grounded by actual API usage. We evaluate our approach performing retroactive study on the Mammoth, ArgoUML, and Eclipse projects to see if API code templates created from earlier versions could have been helpful to developers in later versions. Our results show that, on average, each API code template our technique mined could have helped developers with creating six, nine, and twelve new methods in Mammoth, ArgoUML, and Eclipse, respectively. In our evaluation, we mined many API code templates from the three test projects that provide evidence that our technique could have helped developers learn and use an API faster in many opportunities.