Compatibility Prediction of Eclipse Third-Party Plug-ins in New Eclipse Releases
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Date
2012
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IEEE
Abstract
Incompatibility between applications developed on
top of frameworks with new versions of the frameworks is a
big nightmare to both developers and users of the applications.
Understanding the factors that cause incompatibilities is a step
to solving them. One such direction is to analyze and identify
parts of the reusable code of the framework that are prone to
change. In this study we carried out an empirical investigation
on 11 Eclipse SDK releases (1.0 to 3.7) and 288 Eclipse thirdparty
plug-ins (ETPs) with two main goals: First, to determine
the relationship between the age of Eclipse non-APIs (internal
implementations) used by an ETP and the compatibility of
the ETP. We found that third-party plug-in that use only old
non-APIs have a high chance of compatibility success in new
SDK releases compared to those that use at least one newly
introduced non-API. Second, our goal was to build and test a
predictive model for the compatibility of an ETP, supported
in a given SDK release in a newer SDK release. Our findings
produced 23 statistically significant prediction models having
high values of the strength of the relationship between the
predictors and the prediction (logistic regression R2 of up to
0.810). In addition, the results from model testing indicate high
values of up to 100% of precision and recall and up to 98%
of accuracy of the predictions. Finally, despite the fact that
SDK releases with API breaking changes, i.e., 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0,
have got nothing to do with non-APIs, our findings reveal that
non-APIs introduced in these releases have a significant impact
on the compatibility of the ETPs that use them.
Description
Keywords
Eclipse, Plug-ins, Non-APIs, Prediction
Citation
Businge, J., Serebrenik, A., & van den Brand, M. (2012, September). Compatibility prediction of Eclipse third-party plug-ins in new Eclipse releases. In 2012 IEEE 12th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (pp. 164-173). IEEE.