Understanding Developers’ Needs on Deprecation as a Language Feature
Deprecation is a language feature that allows API producers to mark a feature as obsolete. We aim to gain a deep understanding of the needs of API producers and consumers alike regarding deprecation. To that end, we investigate why API producers deprecate features, whether they remove deprecated features, how they expect consumers to react, and what prompts an API consumer to react to deprecation. To achieve this goal we conduct semi-structured interviews with 17 third-party Java API producers and survey 170 Java developers. We observe that the current deprecation mechanism in Java and the proposal to enhance it does not address all the needs of a developer. This leads us to propose and evaluate three further enhancements to the deprecation mechanism.
Thu 31 MayDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
14:00 - 15:30 | Studying Software Engineers IJournal first papers / Technical Papers at H2 room Chair(s): Amy Ko University of Washington | ||
14:00 20mTalk | Understanding Developers’ Needs on Deprecation as a Language Feature Technical Papers Anand Ashok Sawant , Maurício Aniche Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, Arie van Deursen Delft University of Technology, Alberto Bacchelli University of Zurich Pre-print | ||
14:20 20mTalk | On The Dichotomy of Debugging Behavior Among Programmers Technical Papers Moritz Beller Delft University of Technology, Niels Spruit , Diomidis Spinellis Athens University of Economics and Business, Andy Zaidman TU Delft Pre-print | ||
14:40 20mTalk | Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals Journal first papers Xin Xia Monash University, Lingfeng Bao , David Lo Singapore Management University, Zhenchang Xing Australia National University, Ahmed E. Hassan Queen's University, Shanping Li | ||
15:00 20mTalk | Data Scientists in Software Teams: State of the Art and Challenges Journal first papers Miryung Kim University of California at Los Angeles, USA, Thomas Zimmermann Microsoft Research, Robert Deline , Andrew Begel Microsoft Research Link to publication DOI Authorizer link Pre-print | ||
15:20 10mTalk | Q&A in groups Technical Papers |