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Mining usage patterns for the Android API
Author(s) -
Hudson Silva Borges,
Marco Túlio Valente
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
peerj computer science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2376-5992
DOI - 10.7717/peerj-cs.12
Subject(s) - android (operating system) , documentation , computer science , world wide web , android application , operating system
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

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