Print Email Facebook Twitter Why are features deprecated? Title Why are features deprecated?: An investigation into the motivation behind deprecation Author Sawant, A.A. (TU Delft Software Engineering) Huang, Guangzhe (Student TU Delft) Vilen, Gabriel (Student TU Delft) Stojkovski, Stefan (Student TU Delft) Bacchelli, A. (University of Zürich) Contributor O'Conner, L. (editor) Date 2018-09-27 Abstract In this study, we investigate why API producers deprecate features. Previous work has shown us that knowing the rationale behind deprecation of an API aids a consumer in deciding to react, thus hinting at a diversity of deprecation reasons. We manually analyze the Javadoc of 374 deprecated methods pertaining four mainstream Java APIs to see whether the reason behind deprecation is mentioned. We find that understanding the rationale from just the Javadoc is insufficient; hence we add other data sources such as the source code, issue tracker data and commit history. We observe 12 reasons that trigger API producers to deprecate a feature. We evaluate an automated approach to classify these motivations. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d00095c1-270a-48f6-81d1-e212de480fd3 DOI https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2018.00011 Publisher IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA ISBN 978-1-5386-7871-8 Source Proceedings - 2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2018 Event ICSME 2018, 2018-09-23 → 2018-09-29, Madrid, Spain Bibliographical note Accepted author manuscript Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights © 2018 A.A. Sawant, Guangzhe Huang, Gabriel Vilen, Stefan Stojkovski, A. Bacchelli Files PDF deprecation_reasons.pdf 997.16 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:d00095c1-270a-48f6-81d1-e212de480fd3/datastream/OBJ/view