Towards the automated recovery of complex temporal API-usage patterns
Mohamed Aymen Saied, Houari A. Sahraoui, Edouard Batot, Michalis Famelis, Pierre-Olivier Talbot · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference · 2018
Despite the many advantages, the use of external libraries through their APIs remains difficult because of the usage patterns and constraints that are hidden or not properly documented. Existing work provides different techniques to recover API usage patterns from client programs in order to help developers understand and use those libraries. However, most of these techniques produce basic patterns that generally do not involve temporal properties. In this paper, we discuss the problem of temporal usage patterns recovery and propose a genetic-programming algorithm to solve it. Our evaluation on different APIs shows that the proposed algorithm allows to derive non-trivial temporal usage patterns that are useful and generalizable to new API clients.