Abstract Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a tremendous resource—that is,
when they are stable. Several studies have shown that this is unfortunately not the case. Of …

Developers often inspect a diff patch during peer code reviews. Diff patches show low-level
program differences per file without summarizing systematic changes--similar, related …

Modern software applications rely heavily on the usage of libraries, which provide reusable
functionality, to accelerate the development process. As libraries evolve and release new …

When developing new software, third-party libraries are commonly used to reduce
implementation efforts. However, even these libraries undergo evolution activities to offer …

With the evolution of an API library, its documentation also evolves. The evolution of API
documentation is common knowledge for programmers and library developers, but not in a …

It has become common practice to build programs by using libraries. While the benefits of
reuse are well known, an often overlooked risk are system runtime failures due to API …

Developers often resort to online Q&A forums such as Stack Overflow (SO) for filling their
programming needs. Although code examples on those forums are good starting points …

One of the most common strategies to develop new software is to take advantage of existing
source code, which is available in comprehensive packages called third-party libraries. As …

Nowadays, due to the frequent technological innovation and market changes, software
libraries are evolving very quickly. Backward compatibility has always been one of the most …

Refactoring is an essential activity during software evolution. Frequently, practitioners rely
on such transformations to improve source code maintainability and quality. As a …