Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
5-2021
Abstract
The Android operating system (OS) is often updated, where each new version may involve API deprecation. Usages of deprecated APIs in Android apps need to be updated to ensure the apps' compatibility with the old and new versions of the Android OS. In this work, we propose AndroEvolve, an automated tool to update usages of deprecated Android APIs, that addresses the limitations of the state-of-the-art tool, CocciEvolve. AndroEvolve utilizes data flow analysis to solve the problem of out-of-method-boundary variables, and variable denormalization to remove the temporary variables introduced by CocciEvolve. We evaluated the accuracy of AndroEvolve using a dataset of 360 target files and 20 deprecated Android APIs, where AndroEvolve is able to produce 319 correct updates, compared to CocciEvolve which only produces 249 correct updates. We also evaluated the readability of AndroEvolve's update results using a manual and an automatic evaluation. Both evaluations demonstrated that the code produced by AndroEvolve has higher readability than CocciEvolve's. A video demonstration of AndroEvolve is available at https://youtu.be/siU0tuMITXI.
Keywords
Program transformation, Android, data flow analysis, readability, API deprecation, API update
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE): Companion Proceedings: May 25-28, Madrid, Virtual
First Page
1
Last Page
4
ISBN
9781665412193
Identifier
10.1109/ICSE-Companion52605.2021.00021
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Embargo Period
7-11-2021
Citation
HARYONO, Stefanus A.; THUNG, Ferdian; LO, David; JIANG, Lingxiao; LAWALL, Julia; KANG, Hong Jin; SERRANO, Lucas; and MULLER, Gilles.
AndroEvolve: Automated update for Android deprecated-API usages. (2021). 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE): Companion Proceedings: May 25-28, Madrid, Virtual. 1-4.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6034
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-Companion52605.2021.00021