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APICIA: An API change impact analyzer for Android apps

conference contribution
posted on 2025-01-06, 03:43 authored by Tarek Mahmud, Meiru CheMeiru Che, Jihan Rouijel, Mujahid Khan, Guowei Yang
Android APIs are updated frequently, making it critical to analyze the impact of these updates on Android apps to ensure their reliability. In this paper, we introduce APICIA, a tool that can be used for analyzing the impact of API changes on Android apps. APICIA identifies program elements such as classes, methods, and statements that have been affected, along with affected tests and untested affected code following the target API update. Our evaluation on 31 real-world Android apps shows that APICIA can be cost-effective by pinpointing only 35.31% of tests per app on average that may exhibit different behaviors (e.g. app crashes) due to the API update. Furthermore, since many of the affected statements are not covered by existing tests, APICIA can also aid developers in expanding their test suite to cover these statements. APICIA is publicly available at https://github.com/TSUMahmud/apicia and a screencast presenting the demonstration of APICIA is available at https://tinyurl.com/apicia-tool.

Funding

Category 2 - Other Public Sector Grants Category

History

Start Page

99

End Page

103

Number of Pages

5

Start Date

2024-04-14

Finish Date

2024-04-20

eISSN

2574-1934

ISSN

2574-1926

ISBN-13

9798400705021

Location

Lisbon, Portugal

Publisher

IEEE

Place of Publication

Piscataway, NJ

Peer Reviewed

  • Yes

Open Access

  • No

Era Eligible

  • Yes

Name of Conference

2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

Parent Title

2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion)

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