caa a22 4500 605495602 CHVBK 20210128100532.0 cr unu---uuuuu 210128e20150301xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/s11219-013-9221-3 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/s11219-013-9221-3 Eclipse API usage: the good and the bad [Elektronische Daten] [John Businge, Alexander Serebrenik, Mark van den Brand] Today, when constructing software systems, many developers build their systems on top of frameworks. Eclipse is such a framework that has been in existence for over a decade. Like many other evolving software systems, the Eclipse platform has both stable and supported interfaces ("good”) and unstable, discouraged and unsupported interfaces ("bad”). In this study, we investigate Eclipse interface usage by Eclipse third-party plug-ins (ETPs) based on whether they use bad interfaces or not. The investigations, based on empirical analysis present the following observations. First, we discovered that 44% of the 512 analyzed Eclipse third-party plug-ins depend on "bad” interfaces and that developers continue to use "bad” interfaces. Second, we have observed that plug-ins that use or extend at least one "bad” interface are comparatively larger and use more functionality from Eclipse than those that use only "good” interfaces. Third, the findings show that the ETPs use a diverse set of "bad” interfaces. Fourth, we observed that the reason why the bad interfaces are being eliminated from the ETPs' source code is, because (ETP developers believe) these non-APIs will cause incompatibilities when a version of the ETP is ported to new Eclipse SDK release. Finally, we observed that when developers eliminate problematic "bad” interfaces, they either re-implement the same functionality in their own API, find equivalent SDK good interfaces, or completely delete the entities in the ETPs' source code that use the functionality from the "bad” interfaces. Springer Science+Business Media New York, 2013 Eclipse nationallicence API usage nationallicence Software evolution nationallicence Businge John Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands aut Serebrenik Alexander Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands aut van den Brand Mark Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands aut Software Quality Journal Springer US; http://www.springer-ny.com 23/1(2015-03-01), 107-141 0963-9314 23:1<107 2015 23 11219 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-013-9221-3 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-013-9221-3 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Businge John Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands aut NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Serebrenik Alexander Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands aut NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- van den Brand Mark Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Software Quality Journal Springer US; http://www.springer-ny.com 23/1(2015-03-01), 107-141 0963-9314 23:1<107 2015 23 11219