API-Evolution Support with Diff-CatchUp

Applications built on reusable component frameworks are subject to two independent, and potentially conflicting, evolution processes. The application evolves in response to the specific requirements and desired qualities of the application's stakeholders. On the other hand, the evolution of the...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on software engineering 2007-12, Vol.33 (12), p.818-836
Main Authors: Zhenchang Xing, Stroulia, E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
API
Application programming interface
Application software
Breaking
Case studies
Costs
D.2.10.g Object-oriented design methods
D.2.2.eProgrammer workbench
D.2.3.aObject-oriented programming
D.2.3Coding Tools and Techniques
Developers
Digital Object Identifier
Documentation
Evolution
Migration
Object oriented programming
Open source software
Programming
Proposals
Prototypes
Recognition
Software development
Software engineering
Software prototyping
Software tools
Software upgrading
Studies
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Applications built on reusable component frameworks are subject to two independent, and potentially conflicting, evolution processes. The application evolves in response to the specific requirements and desired qualities of the application's stakeholders. On the other hand, the evolution of the component framework is driven by the need to improve the framework functionality and quality while maintaining its generality. Thus, changes to the component framework frequently change its API on which its client applications rely and, as a result, these applications break. To date, there has been some work aimed at supporting the migration of client applications to newer versions of their underlying frameworks, but it usually requires that the framework developers do additional work for that purpose or that the application developers use the same tools as the framework developers. In this paper, we discuss our approach to tackle the API-evolution problem in the context of reuse-based software development, which automatically recognizes the API changes of the reused framework and proposes plausible replacements to the "obsolete" API based on working examples of the framework code base. This approach has been implemented in the Diff-CatchUp tool. We report on two case studies that we have conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach with its Diff-CatchUp prototype.
ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2007.70747