Abstract
Application Programming Interface (API) usage mining is an approach used to extract the common API usage to help developers get used to the APIs. However, in Android applications, the usage can be hidden or fragmented due to class inheritance. Such hidden or fragmented usages could decrease the coverage and accuracy of the existing API mining approaches. Our method aims to resolve the problem of hidden and fragmented usages through API generalization. This generalized usage is expected to be applicable to every class that inherits a class in the usage. In the experiment, among 442,809 Android API usages, 104,839 usages either were hidden or fragmented. By revealing such usages, the accuracy of the code completion was improved by at most 6.66%. The usage generalization was efficient for extracting API usages in Android applications in which the APIs are used through class inheritance.
Highlights
Software development has relied on third-party libraries instead of writing the code from scratch
This paper focuses on the hidden and fragmented usages when the Application Programming Interface (API) usages are collected in Android applications
A sequence was considered fragmented when its generalized form had more than one API call than in the raw sequence
Summary
Software development has relied on third-party libraries instead of writing the code from scratch. These libraries define their own Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that provide various functionalities required for developing software programs. It has been difficult for developers to grow accustomed to these APIs [1]. To resolve this, existing libraries have provided developers with several materials such as API documentation, unified name convention rule, and example code. These approaches are insufficient to present various API usages [1]. API usage mining is another approach that aims to resolve the difficulties in learning APIs
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