Who plays with whom? ... and how? mining API interaction patterns from source code

State-of-science automated software engineering techniques increasingly rely on specification mining to provide API usage patterns for numerous applications, e.g. context sensitive code-completion, bug-detection or bug-fixing techniques. While some existing approaches already yield good results with respect to diverse tasks, the focus has always been on the inference of high-quality, reusable specifications for single APIs. However, in contemporary software development it is commonplace to combine a multitude of different libraries in order to increase efficiency by avoiding the reimplementation of the wheel. In contrast to prior research, in this idea paper we propose to explicitly study the patterns of interaction between multiple different APIs. First, we introduce a method for mining API interactions patterns from existing applications. Then, we give an overview of our preliminary investigation, in which we applied the method to a case-study of nearly 500 Android applications. The exemplary results show that there definitely exist valuable interaction patterns which can be helpful for various traditional and automated software engineering tasks.