Flow-Augmented Call Graph: A New Foundation for Taming API Complexity

Software systems often undergo significant changes in their life cycle, exposing increasingly complex API to their developers.Without methodical guidances, it is easy to become bogged down in a morass of complex API even for the professional software developers. This paper presents the Flow-Augmented Call Graph (FACG) for taming API complexity. Augmenting the call graph with control flow analysis brings us a new insight to capture the significance of the caller-callee linkages in the call graph. We apply the proposed FACG in API recommendation and compare our approach with the state-of-the-art approaches in the same domain. The evaluation result indicates that our approach is more effective in retrieving the relevant APIs with regard to the original API documentation.

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