Temporal Analysis of API Usage Concepts

Software reuse through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is an integral part of software development. The functionality offered by an API is not always accessed uniformly throughout the lifetime of a client program. The authors propose Temporal API Usage Pattern Mining to detect API usage patterns in terms of their time of introduction into client programs. They detect concepts as distinct groups of API functionality from the change history of a client program. They locate those concepts in the client change history and detect temporal usage patterns, where a pattern contains a set of concepts that were added into the client program in a specific temporal order.