Do API Migrations revert commits - A Preliminary Investigation
Omar Meqdadi, Nazim Choudhury · 2023
Reverted change is a popular and crude approach to recovering from problematic commits in software development. These changes hinder the development progress and complicate the maintenance of the software systems, especially in the case of changes related to API migration. This study examined the reverted commits related to API migration of six open-source systems to investigate (i) the ratio of undoing the problematic changes (i.e., reverted commits) and (ii) the effectiveness of API migration commits in reverting problematic changes caused by other evolution tasks. The outcomes of the study demonstrate that (i) API-migration activities aren’t solely responsible for the reverted commits, and (ii) the number of problematic changes caused by the other evolutionary tasks and reverted by API migration tasks is statistically significant.