research-article

The driving forces of API evolution

Authors:

William Granli,

Eric KnaussAuthors Info & Claims

IWPSE 2015: Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution

Pages 28 - 37

https://doi.org/10.1145/2804360.2804364

Published: 30 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Evolving an Application Programming Interface (API) is a delicate activity, as modifications to them can significantly impact their users. The increasing use of APIs means that software development organisations must take an empirical and scientific approach to the way they manage the evolution of their APIs. If no attempt at analysing or quantifying the evolution of an API is made, there will be a diminished understanding of the evolution, and possible improvements to the maintenance strategy will be difficult to identify. We believe that long-standing software evolution theories can provide additional insight to the field of APIs, and can be of great use to companies maintaining APIs. In this case study, we conduct a qualitative investigation to understand what drives the evolution of an industry company's existing API, by examining two versions of the API interface. The changes were analysed based on two software evolution theories, and the extent to which we could reverse engineer the change decisions was determined by interviewing an architect of the API. The results of this analysis show that the largest driving force of the APIs evolution was the desire for new functionality. Our findings which show that changes happen sporadically, rather than continuously, appear to show that the law of Conservation of Organisational Stability was not a considerable factor for the evolution of the API. We also found that it is possible to reverse engineer change decisions and in doing so, identified that the feedback loop of an API is an important area of improvement.

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Cited By

Koci RFranch XJovanovic PAbelló A(2024)Web API Change-Proneness Prediction2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00050(429-434)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00050
Ye Saukh SPuchko T(2024)Sustainable web API evolution: Forecasting software development effortIOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science10.1088/1755-1315/1415/1/0120771415:1(012077)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/1415/1/012077
Puchko T(2023)Evolution of Web Application Programming Interfaces: Driving Forces, Effects on Clients, and Patterns for ProvidersÈlektronnoe modelirovanie10.15407/emodel.45.04.06145:4(61-77)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.15407/emodel.45.04.061
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The driving forces of API evolution
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues

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cover image ACM Conferences

IWPSE 2015: Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution

August 2015

78 pages

ISBN:9781450338165

DOI:10.1145/2804360

Program Chairs:
Ángela Lozano,
Gregorio Robles

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 August 2015

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ESEC/FSE'15

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SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE'15: Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 30, 2015

Bergamo, Italy

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Cited By

Koci RFranch XJovanovic PAbelló A(2024)Web API Change-Proneness Prediction2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00050(429-434)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00050
Ye Saukh SPuchko T(2024)Sustainable web API evolution: Forecasting software development effortIOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science10.1088/1755-1315/1415/1/0120771415:1(012077)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/1415/1/012077
Puchko T(2023)Evolution of Web Application Programming Interfaces: Driving Forces, Effects on Clients, and Patterns for ProvidersÈlektronnoe modelirovanie10.15407/emodel.45.04.06145:4(61-77)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.15407/emodel.45.04.061
Koçi RFranch XJovanovic PAbelló A(2023)Web API evolution patterns: A usage-driven approachJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111609198(111609)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111609
Nascimento RHora AFigueiredo E(2022)Exploring API Deprecation Evolution in JavaScript2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00031(169-173)Online publication date: Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00031
Sharma PKaur DRamola B(2022)JavaScript API Deprecation Landscape: A Mining Study2022 International Conference on Cyber Resilience (ICCR)10.1109/ICCR56254.2022.9995957(1-5)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCR56254.2022.9995957
Lamothe MGuéhéneuc YShang W(2021)A Systematic Review of API Evolution LiteratureACM Computing Surveys10.1145/347013354:8(1-36)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3470133
Nascimento RBrito AHora AFigueiredo E(2020)JavaScript API Deprecation in the Wild: A First Assessment2020 IEEE 27th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER48275.2020.9054854(567-571)Online publication date: Feb-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER48275.2020.9054854
Matos AFilho JRocha LStorey MAdams BHaiduc S(2019)Splitting APIsProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1109/MSR.2019.00062(360-370)Online publication date: 26-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MSR.2019.00062

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