Towards assisting developers in API usage by automated recovery of complex temporal patterns

Abstract Context Despite the many advantages, the use of external libraries through their APIs remains difficult because of the usage patterns and constraints that are hidden or not properly documented. Existing work provides different techniques to recover API usage patterns from client programs in order to help developers use those libraries. However, most of these techniques produce patterns that generally do not involve temporal properties. Objective In this paper, we discuss the problem of temporal usage patterns recovery and propose an algorithm to solve it. We also discuss how the obtained patterns can be used at different stages of client development. Method We address the recovery of temporal API usage patterns as an optimization problem and solve it using a genetic-programming algorithm. Results Our evaluation on different APIs shows that the proposed algorithm allows to derive non-trivial temporal usage that are useful and generalizable to new API clients. Conclusion Recovering API usage temporal patterns helps client developers to use APIs in an appropriate way. In addition to potentially improve productivity, such patterns also helps preventing errors that result from an incorrect use of the APIs.

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