ECSA 2022
Mon 19 - Fri 23 September 2022 Prague, Czech Republic
Thu 22 Sep 2022 15:40 - 15:45 at S4 - Components, APIs and interface management Chair(s): Jasmin Jahic, Nuno Laranjeiro

OpenAPI is a language agnostic standard used to describe Web APIs which supports the explicit deprecation of interface features. To assess how RESTFul APIs evolve over time and observe how their developers handle the introduction of breaking changes, we performed an empirical study on a dataset composed of 1,192,664 operations and their histories distributed across 407,028 commits contained in 149,704 unique APIs. These were mined from GitHub, extracting them from a collection of 780,078 OpenAPI description artifacts belonging to 271,111 APIs. Our results focus on detecting breaking changes due to operations removal and whether and to which extent deprecation is used to warn clients developers about dependencies they should no longer rely on. We found that only 5.2% of the explicit-deprecated operations and 8.0% of the deprecated-in- description operations end with a removal. We conclude that developers tend to avoid the operations removal after their deprecation, and even when they remove them, the tendency is do it in the first two years after the deprecation. While there is a low negative correlation between the presence of deprecated operations and the APIs age, we found also a weak negative correlation between the total amount of the defined operations and the ratio between the number of explicit-deprecated and the total amount of operations. This finding indicates the presence of more explicit-deprecated operations in smaller APIs, rather than in bigger ones.

Thu 22 Sep

Displayed time zone: Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague change

15:30 - 17:00
Components, APIs and interface managementResearch Papers / Tools & Demos at S4
Chair(s): Jasmin Jahic University of Cambridge, UK, Nuno Laranjeiro University of Coimbra
15:30
5m
Full-paper
Avoiding Excessive Data Exposure through Microservice APIs
Research Papers
A: Patric Genfer University of Vienna, A: Uwe Zdun University of Vienna
15:35
5m
Full-paper
Documentation-as-code for Interface Control Document management in Systems of Systems: a Technical Action Research Study
Research Papers
A: Héctor Cadavid University of Groningen, A: Vasilios Andrikopoulos University of Groningen, A: Paris Avgeriou University of Groningen, The Netherlands
15:40
5m
Short-paper
To deprecate or to simply drop operations? An empirical study on the evolution of a large OpenAPI collection
Research Papers
A: Fabio Di Lauro , A: Cesare Pautasso Software Institute, Faculty of Informatics, USI Lugano, A: souhaila serbout Software Institute @ USI
15:45
5m
Demonstration
ExpressO: From Express.js implementation code to OpenAPI interface descriptions
Tools & Demos
A: Alessandro Romanelli , A: souhaila serbout Software Institute @ USI, A: Cesare Pautasso Software Institute, Faculty of Informatics, USI Lugano
15:50
5m
Demonstration
A Toolchain for Simulation Component Specification and Identification
Tools & Demos
A: Sandro Koch Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
15:55
65m
Other
Discussion
Research Papers


Information for Participants
Thu 22 Sep 2022 15:30 - 17:00 at S4 - Components, APIs and interface management Chair(s): Jasmin Jahic, Nuno Laranjeiro
Info for session

Each paper is presented as a 5-minute pitch talk at the beginning. The rest of the session is a discussion.

Info for room S4:

After reaching the 3rd floor (either by elevator or the main staircase), turn right.