API deprecation: a retrospective analysis and detection method for code examples on the web

Zhou, Jing; Walker, Robert J.

doi:10.1145/2950290.2950298

Cited by 59 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Recently, Fischer et al find that 29% of security-related snippets in Stack Overflow are insecure and these snippets could have been reused by over 1 million Android apps on Google play, which raises a big security concern [9]. Previous studies have also investigated the quality of online code examples in terms of compilability [23,37], unchecked obsolete usage [39], and comprehension issues [29]. However, none of these studies have investigated the reliability of online code examples in terms of API usage correctness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are code examples on an online Q&A forum reliable?

Zhang

Upadhyaya

Reinhardt

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

140

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Programmers often consult an online Q&A forum such as Stack Overflow to learn new APIs. This paper presents an empirical study on the prevalence and severity of API misuse on Stack Overflow. To reduce manual assessment effort, we design ExampleCheck, an API usage mining framework that extracts patterns from over 380K Java repositories on GitHub and subsequently reports potential API usage violations in Stack Overflow posts. We analyze 217,818 Stack Overflow posts using ExampleCheck and find that 31% may have potential API usage violations that could produce unexpected behavior such as program crashes and resource leaks. Such API misuse is caused by three main reasons---missing control constructs, missing or incorrect order of API calls, and incorrect guard conditions. Even the posts that are accepted as correct answers or upvoted by other programmers are not necessarily more reliable than other posts in terms of API misuse. This study result calls for a new approach to augment Stack Overflow with alternative API usage details that are not typically shown in curated examples.ABSTRACT Programmers often consult an online Q&A forum such as Stack Overflow to learn new APIs. This paper presents an empirical study on the prevalence and severity of API misuse on Stack Overflow. To reduce manual assessment effort, we design ExampleCheck, an API usage mining framework that extracts patterns from over 380K Java repositories on GitHub and subsequently reports potential API usage violations in Stack Overflow posts. We analyze 217,818 Stack Overflow posts using ExampleCheck and find that 31% may have potential API usage violations that could produce unexpected behavior such as program crashes and resource leaks. Such API misuse is caused by three main reasons-missing control constructs, missing or incorrect order of API calls, and incorrect guard conditions. Even the posts that are accepted as correct answers or upvoted by other programmers are not necessarily more reliable than other posts in terms of API misuse. This study result calls for a new approach to augment Stack Overflow with alternative API usage details that are not typically shown in curated examples. CCS CONCEPTS• General and reference → Empirical studies; • Software and its engineering → Software reliability; Collaboration in software development;KEYWORDS online Q&A forum, API usage pattern, code example assessment ACM Reference Format:

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are code examples on an online Q&A forum reliable?

Zhang

Upadhyaya

Reinhardt

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

140

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Subramanian and Holmes find that the majority of SO snippets are free standing statements with no class or method headers [23]. Zhou et al find that 86 of 200 accepted SO posts use deprecated APIs but only 3 of them are reported by other programmers [9].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…SO examples are created for illustration purposes, which can serve as a good starting point. However, these examples may be insufficient to be ported to a production environment, as previous studies find that SO examples may suffer from API usage violations [7], insecure coding practices [8], unchecked obsolete usage [9], and incomplete code * Both the first author and the second author contributed significantly and this research is led by UCLA. fragments [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing and Supporting Adaptation of Online Code Examples

Zhang

Yang

Lopes

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

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Developers often resort to online Q&A forums such as Stack Overflow (SO) for filling their programming needs.Although code examples on those forums are good starting points, they are often incomplete and inadequate for developers' local program contexts; adaptation of those examples is necessary to integrate them to production code. As a consequence, the process of adapting online code examples is done over and over again, by multiple developers independently. Our work extensively studies these adaptations and variations, serving as the basis for a tool that helps integrate these online code examples in a target context in an interactive manner.We perform a large-scale empirical study about the nature and extent of adaptations and variations of SO snippets. We construct a comprehensive dataset linking SO posts to GitHub counterparts based on clone detection, time stamp analysis, and explicit URL references. We then qualitatively inspect 400 SO examples and their GitHub counterparts and develop a taxonomy of 24 adaptation types. Using this taxonomy, we build an automated adaptation analysis technique on top of GumTree to classify the entire dataset into these types. We build a Chrome extension called EXAMPLESTACK that automatically lifts an adaptation-aware template from each SO example and its GitHub counterparts to identify hot spots where most changes happen. A user study with sixteen programmers shows that seeing the commonalities and variations in similar GitHub counterparts increases their confidence about the given SO example, and helps them grasp a more comprehensive view about how to reuse the example differently and avoid common pitfalls.

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“…The recently proposed framework DEPRECATION WATCHER detects deprecated APIs in the source code snippets of StackOverflow posts. Since StackOverflow posts are concise and focus on a single topic, a lightweight tool like DEPRECATION WATCHER can be effective in detecting deprecated API while disregarding the natural language context of the post. However, researchers have pointed out that the content of the surrounding text is especially important in high‐quality answers on StackOverflow .…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although researchers have proposed approaches aimed at extracting the mentions of API elements from Web resources, all of these techniques fail to manage the existence of numerous API versions with removed or deprecated API elements . Researchers have proposed tools that automatically detect the compatible versions of a source code repository, but these tools are not appropriate for detecting versions of documents like tutorials, which contain a combination of natural language text and source code .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatically identifying valid API versions for software development tutorials on the Web

Nishi

Damevski

2019

J Software Evolu Process

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Online tutorials are a valuable source of community‐created information used by numerous developers to learn new APIs and techniques. Once written, tutorials are rarely actively curated and can become dated over time. Tutorials often reference APIs that change rapidly, and deprecated classes, methods, and fields can render tutorials inapplicable to newer releases of the API. Newer tutorials may not be compatible with older APIs that are still in use. In this paper, we first empirically study the tutorial versioning problem, confirming its presence in popular tutorials on the Web. We subsequently propose a technique, based on similar techniques in the literature, for automatically detecting the applicable API version ranges of tutorials, given access to the official API documentation they reference. The proposed technique identifies each API mention in a tutorial and maps the mention to the corresponding API element in the official documentation. The version of the tutorial is determined by combining the version ranges of all of the constituent API mentions. Our technique's precision varies from 61% to 89% and recall varies from 42% to 84% based on different levels of granularity of API mentions and different problem constraints. We observe API methods are the most challenging to accurately disambiguate due to method overloading. As the API mentions in tutorials are often redundant, and each mention of a specific API element commonly occurs several times in a tutorial, the distance of the predicted version range from the true version range is low: 3.61 on average for the tutorials in our sample.

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API deprecation: a retrospective analysis and detection method for code examples on the web

Cited by 59 publications

References 28 publications

Are code examples on an online Q&A forum reliable?

Are code examples on an online Q&A forum reliable?

Analyzing and Supporting Adaptation of Online Code Examples

Automatically identifying valid API versions for software development tutorials on the Web

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