Automating the detection of third-party Java library migration at the function level
Hussein Alrubaye, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer · Computer Science and Software Engineering · 2018
The process of migrating between different third-party libraries is very complex. Typically, developers need to find functions in the new library that are most adequate in replacing the functions of the retired library. This process is subjective and time-consuming as developers need to fully understand the documentation of both libraries' Application Programming Interfaces, and find the right match between their functions if it exists. In this context, several studies rely on mining existing library migrations to provide developers with by-example approaches for similar scenarios. In this paper, we propose a mining approach that extracts all the manually-performed function replacements for a given library migration. Our approach combines the mined function-change patterns with function-related lexical similarity to accurately detect mappings between replacing/replaced functions. Using our enhanced mining process, we perform a comparative study between state-of-art approaches for detecting migration traces at the function level. Our findings have shown its efficiency in accurately detecting migration fragments and it has enhanced the accuracy of state-of-art approaches in finding correct functions changes. We finally provide the community with a dataset of migrations between popular Java libraries, and their corresponding code changes at the function level.