Automatic Android Deprecated-API Usage Update by Learning from Single Updated Example
This addresses a specific, incremental improvement for Android developers by reducing the need for multiple examples in automated API updates.
The paper tackles the problem of automating updates for deprecated Android APIs, which is time-consuming for developers, by proposing CocciEvolve, a tool that learns from a single after-update example and achieves an 85% success rate on 112 updates.
Due to the deprecation of APIs in the Android operating system,developers have to update usages of the APIs to ensure that their applications work for both the past and current versions of Android.Such updates may be widespread, non-trivial, and time-consuming. Therefore, automation of such updates will be of great benefit to developers. AppEvolve, which is the state-of-the-art tool for automating such updates, relies on having before- and after-update examples to learn from. In this work, we propose an approach named CocciEvolve that performs such updates using only a single after-update example. CocciEvolve learns edits by extracting the relevant update to a block of code from an after-update example. From preliminary experiments, we find that CocciEvolve can successfully perform 96 out of 112 updates, with a success rate of 85%.