Why are features deprecated?

An investigation into the motivation behind deprecation

Conference paper (2018)

Authors

A.A. Sawant Software Engineering - EEMCS
A. Bacchelli University of Zürich
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2018 A.A. Sawant, Guangzhe Huang, Gabriel Vilen, Stefan Stojkovski, A. Bacchelli
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2018.00011
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Published Date

27-09-2018

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

In this study, we investigate why API producers deprecate features. Previous work has shown us that knowing the rationale behind deprecation of an API aids a consumer in deciding to react, thus hinting at a diversity of deprecation reasons. We manually analyze the Javadoc of 374 deprecated methods pertaining four mainstream Java APIs to see whether the reason behind deprecation is mentioned. We find that understanding the rationale from just the Javadoc is insufficient; hence we add other data sources such as the source code, issue tracker data and commit history. We observe 12 reasons that trigger API producers to deprecate a feature. We evaluate an automated approach to classify these motivations.

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