Sawant, Anand (2020): Data originating from deprecation mechanism interviews. Version 1. 4TU.ResearchData. dataset. https://doi.org/10.4121/uuid:23752f31-91b0-4c04-b070-c603541e1e90

Dataset

• Computer Software and Services
• Computer Software

API, deprecation, Java

CC0

RefWorks, BibTeX, Reference Manager, Endnote, DataCite, NLM, DC, CFF

by Anand Sawant

This is a replication package for the qualitative study performed to understand the deprecation mechanism and its needs. Deprecation is a language feature that allows API producers to mark a feature as obsolete. We aim to gain a deep understanding of the needs of API producers and consumers alike regarding deprecation. To that end, we investigate why API producers deprecate features, whether they remove deprecated features, how they expect consumers to react, and what prompts an API consumer to react to deprecation. To achieve this goal we conduct semi-structured interviews with 17 third-party Java API producers and survey 170 Java developers. We observe that the current deprecation mechanism in Java and the proposal to enhance it does not address all the needs of a developer. This leads us to propose and evaluate three further enhancements to the deprecation mechanism.

• 2020-04-02 first online, published, posted

4TU.Centre for Research Data

media types: application/pdf, application/zip, text/csv

• https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180170

• NWO, 612.001.451

TU Delft Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science, Software Engineering Research Group (SERG)