To react, or not to react: Patterns of reaction to API deprecation

Abstract

Application Programming Interfaces (API) provide reusable functionality to aid developers in the development process. The features provided by these APIs might change over time as the API evolves. To allow API consumers to peacefully transition from older obsolete features to new features, API producers make use of the deprecation mechanism that allows them to indicate to the consumer that a feature should no longer be used. The Java language designers noticed that no one was taking these deprecation warnings seriously and continued using outdated features. Due to this, they decided to change the implementation of this feature in Java 9. We question as to what extent this issue exists and whether the Java language designers have a case. We start by identifying the various ways in which an API consumer can react to deprecation. Following this we benchmark the frequency of the reaction patterns by creating a dataset consisting of data mined from 50 API consumers totalling 297,254 GitHub based projects and 1,322,612,567 type-checked method invocations. We see that predominantly consumers do not react to deprecation and we try to explain this behavior by surveying API consumers and by analyzing if the API's deprecation policy has an impact on the consumers' decision to react. RQ 2a : How often do consumers upgrade their dependencies? RQ 2a : How often does each reaction pattern occur?RQ 3 : How do reaction patterns vary across APIs? Once we know the frequency of the observed reaction patterns, we seek to uncover if there is any dominant pattern for the consumers of any of the analyzed APIs. If the majority of the consumers react to deprecation in just one way for an API, we may hypothesize that the behavior of the API Listing 7 Rollback version of the API Empirical Software Engineering (2019) 24:3824-3870

Exploring how deprecated Python library APIs are (not) handled

“…Later, they further conducted semi-structured interviews [44] with 17 third-party Java API producers and survey 170 Java developers to gain a deep understanding of the requirements regarding deprecation from API producers and consumers. More recently, they extracted the patterns of reaction to API deprecation to ascertain the scale of reactions or non-reactions of users to deprecated entities [47]. These work mainly focused on analyzing the impact of API changes [16,17,25,26,28], but they did not investigate how API contributors handle (i.e., declare and document) API deprecations explored in our work.…”

How do open source app developers perceive API changes related to Android battery optimization? An empirical study

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“…In the literature, there are several studies [24][25][26] on understanding the impact of API changes. Specifically, studies such as Salza et al, 27,28 Lamothe et al, 29 and Derr et al, 30 reported the API changes in the Android platform.…”

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