Automatically identifying valid API versions for software development tutorials on the Web. Issue 4 (21st November 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Nishi, Manziba Akanda; Damevski, Kostadin
• Is Part Of: Journal of software. Volume 32:Issue 4(2020)
• Page Start: n/a
• Page End: n/a
• Publication Date: 2019-11-21
• Subjects: API deprecation -- API versioning -- software development tutorials -- software development tutorials versioning; Software engineering -- Periodicals; Computer software -- Development -- Periodicals; Software maintenance -- Periodicals; 005.1
• DOI: 10.1002/smr.2227
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2047-7473

Abstract

Abstract: Online tutorials are a valuable source of community‐created information used by numerous developers to learn new APIs and techniques. Once written, tutorials are rarely actively curated and can become dated over time. Tutorials often reference APIs that change rapidly, and deprecated classes, methods, and fields can render tutorials inapplicable to newer releases of the API. Newer tutorials may not be compatible with older APIs that are still in use. In this paper, we first empirically study the tutorial versioning problem, confirming its presence in popular tutorials on the Web. We subsequently propose a technique, based on similar techniques in the literature, for automatically detecting the applicable API version ranges of tutorials, given access to the official API documentation they reference. The proposed technique identifies each API mention in a tutorial and maps the mention to the corresponding API element in the official documentation. The version of the tutorial is determined by combining the version ranges of all of the constituent API mentions. Our technique's precision varies from 61% to 89% and recall varies from 42% to 84% based on different levels of granularity of API mentions and different problem constraints. We observe API methods are the most challenging to accurately disambiguate due to method overloading. As the API mentions in tutorials are often redundant, and each mention of a specific API element commonly occurs several times in a tutorial, the distance of the predicted version range from the true version range is low: 3.61 on average for the tutorials in our sample.