Published December 30, 2023 | Version CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Journal article Open

An Empirical Study of Bugs in Eclipse Stable Internal Interfaces

Creators

  • 1. Department of Software Engineering, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Mbarara, Uganda.

Contributors

Contact person:

  • 1. Department of Software Engineering, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Mbarara, Uganda.
  • 2. Department of Computer Science, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Mbarara, Uganda.
  • 3. Department of Information Technology and Computer Science, Kabale University, Kabale, Uganda.

Description

Abstract: The Eclipse framework is a popular and widely used framework that has been evolving for over a decade. The framework provides both stable interfaces (APIs) and unstable interfaces (non-APIs). Despite being discouraged by Eclipse, application developers often use non-APIs which cause their systems to fail when ported to new framework releases. Previous studies showed that applications using relatively old non-APIs are more likely to be compatible with new releases compared to the ones that used newly introduced non-APIs. Furthermore, from our previous study about the stability of Eclipse internal interfaces, we discovered that there exist 327K stable non-API methods as the Eclipse framework evolves. In the same study, we recommended that 327K stable non-API methods can be used by Eclipse interface providers as possible candidates for promotion to stable interfaces. However, since non-APIs are unsupported and considered to be immature i.e., can contain bugs, to this end there exist a need to first investigate the stable non-APIs for possible bugs before they can be promoted to APIs. In this study, we empirically investigated the stable non-API for possible bugs using Sonarqube software quality tool. We discovered that over 79.8% classes containing old stable non-APIs methods have zero bugs. Results from this study can be used by both interface providers and users as a starting point to analyze which interfaces are well tested and also estimate how much work could be involved when performing bug fixing for a given eclipse release.

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Additional details

Identifiers

DOI
10.54105/ijsepm.D9015.072222
EISSN
2582-8339

Dates

Accepted
2022-07-15
Manuscript received on 27 June 2022 | Revised Manuscript received on 05 July 2022 | Manuscript Accepted on 15 July 2022 | Manuscript published on 30 December 2023

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