Mining usage patterns for the Android API

نویسندگان

  • Hudson Borges
  • Marco Tulio Valente
چکیده

API methods are not used alone, but in groups and following patterns. However, despite being a key information for API users, most usage patterns are not described in official API documents. In this article, we report a study that evaluates the feasibility of automatically enriching API documents with information on usage patterns. For this purpose, we mine and analyze 1,952 usage patterns, from a set of 396 Android applications. As part of our findings, we report that the Android API has many undocumented and non-trivial usage patterns, which can be inferred using association rule mining algorithms. We also describe a field study where a version of the original Android documentation is instrumented with the extracted usage patterns. During 17 months, this documentation received 77,863 visits from professional Android developers. Subjects Software Engineering

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Mining API Usage Patterns by Applying Method Categorization to Improve Code Completion

Developers often face difficulties while using APIs. API usage patterns can aid them in using APIs efficiently, which are extracted from source code stored in software repositories. Previous approaches have mined repositories to extract API usage patterns by simply applying data mining techniques to the collection of method invocations of API objects. In these approaches, respective functional ...

متن کامل

MAPO: Mining and Recommending API Usage Patterns

To improve software productivity, when constructing new software systems, programmers often reuse existing libraries or frameworks by invoking methods provided in their APIs. Those API methods, however, are often complex and not well documented. To get familiar with how those API methods are used, programmers often exploit a source code search tool to search for code snippets that use the API m...

متن کامل

Could We Infer API Usage Patterns only using the Library Source Code?

Learning to use existing or new software libraries is a difficult task for software developers, which would impede their productivity. Much existing work has provided different techniques to mine API usage patterns from client programs in order to help developers on understanding and using existing libraries. However, considering only client programs to identify API usage patterns is a strong c...

متن کامل

Broken Fingers: On the Usage of the Fingerprint API in Android

Smartphones are increasingly used for very important tasks such as mobile payments. Correspondingly, new technologies are emerging to provide better security on smartphones. One of the most recent and most interesting is the ability to recognize fingerprints, which enables mobile apps to use biometric-based authentication and authorization to protect security-sensitive operations. In this paper...

متن کامل

Crowd Documentation: Exploring the Coverage and the Dynamics of API Discussions on Stack Overflow

Traditionally, many types of software documentation, such as API documentation, require a process where a few people write for many potential users. The resulting documentation, when it exists, is often of poor quality and lacks sufficient examples and explanations. In this paper, we report on an empirical study to investigate how Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, faci...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:
  • PeerJ Computer Science

دوره 1  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2015