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On Deprecated API Usages: An Exploratory Study of Top-Starred Projects on GitHub

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Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14483))

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Abstract

A deprecated Application Programming Interface (API) is one that is no longer recommended to use by its original developers. While deprecated APIs (i.e., deprecated fields, methods, and classes) are still implemented, they can be removed in future implementations. Therefore, developers should not use deprecated APIs in newly written code and should update existing code so that it does not use deprecated APIs anymore. In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory Mining-Software-Repository study to gather preliminary empirical evidence on deprecated API usages in open-source Java applications. To that end, we quantitatively analyzed the commit histories of 14 applications whose software projects were top-starred on GitHub. We found that deprecated APIs usages are pretty widespread in the studied software applications; and only in half of these applications, developers remove deprecated API usages after few commits and days. Also, half of the studied applications mostly use deprecated APIs declared in their own source code, rather than using deprecated APIs that lie in third-party software. Finally, we noted that the introductions and removals of deprecated API usages are mostly the result of changes made by senior developers, rather than newcomer ones.

P. Cassieri—Independent Researcher.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this paper, we use the term “class” to also refer to interfaces and enums.

  2. 2.

    It is the company that owns SonarQube, SonarLint, and SonarCloud.

  3. 3.

    In GitHub, a fork is a copy of an existing project that allows the fork’s owner to suggest changes from his/her fork to the original project (via pull requests) as well as bring changes from the original project.

  4. 4.

    A commit introduces a deprecated API usage when: (i) a developer writes a piece of source code that uses a deprecated API; (ii) a developer performs a dependency update that makes an already-used API deprecated; and (iii) a developer deprecates an API in its codebase but this API is currently used in that codebase.

  5. 5.

    We considered a deprecated API as removed in any case it disappears from the source code (i.e., deletion of the deprecated API usage without any substitution; replacement of it with another API usage; rollback to a previous version, un-deprecated, of that API; and un-deprecation of an API consumed internally).

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Funding

This study has been partially supported by “MSR4SBOM-Mining Software Repositories for enhanced Software Bills of Materials” (code: P20224HSZE), a research project funded by the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research (MUR).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fisciano, Italy

    Pietro Cassieri

  2. University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Simone Romano & Giuseppe Scanniello

Authors
  1. Pietro Cassieri
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  2. Simone Romano
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  3. Giuseppe Scanniello
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simone Romano .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. FHV Vorarlberg University of Applied Science, Dornbirn, Austria

    Regine Kadgien

  2. Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Andreas Jedlitschka

  3. FHV Vorarlberg University of Applied Science, Dornbirn, Austria

    Andrea Janes

  4. University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Valentina Lenarduzzi

  5. University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Xiaozhou Li

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Cassieri, P., Romano, S., Scanniello, G. (2024). On Deprecated API Usages: An Exploratory Study of Top-Starred Projects on GitHub. In: Kadgien, R., Jedlitschka, A., Janes, A., Lenarduzzi, V., Li, X. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49266-2_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49266-2_29

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-49265-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-49266-2

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