Mining usage patterns for the Android API
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Software Engineering
- Keywords
- Application Programming Interfaces, Usage Patterns, Android
- Copyright
- © 2015 Borges et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Mining usage patterns for the Android API. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1075v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1075v1
Abstract
API methods are not used alone, but in groups and following patterns. However, despite being a key information for API users, most usage patterns are not described in official API documents. In this article, we report a study that evaluates the feasibility of automatically enriching API documents with information on usage patterns. For this purpose, we mine and analyze 1,952 usage patterns, from a set of 396 Android applications. As part of our findings, we report that the Android API has many undocumented and non-trivial usage patterns, which can be inferred using association rule mining algorithms. We also describe a field study where a version of the original Android documentation is instrumented with the extracted usage patterns. During 17 months, this documentation received 77,863 visits from professional Android developers.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ Computer Science for review.