DeepMig: A transformer-based approach to support coupled library and code migrations

Abstract

Context:

While working on software projects, developers often replace third-party libraries (TPLs) with different ones offering similar functionalities. However, choosing a suitable TPL to migrate to is a complex task. As TPLs provide developers with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to allow for the invocation of their functionalities after adopting a new TPL, projects need to be migrated by the methods containing the affected API calls. Altogether, the coupled migration of TPLs and code is a strenuous process, requiring massive development effort. Most of the existing approaches either deal with library or API call migration but usually fail to solve both problems coherently simultaneously.

Objective:

This paper presents DeepMig, a novel approach to the coupled migration of TPLs and API calls. We aim to support developers in managing their projects, at the library and API level, allowing them to increase their productivity.

Methods:

DeepMig is based on a transformer architecture, accepts a set of libraries to predict a new set of libraries. Then, it looks for the changed API calls and recommends a migration plan for the affected methods. We evaluate DeepMig using datasets of Java projects collected from the Maven Central Repository, ensuring an assessment based on real-world dependency configurations.

Results:

Our evaluation reveals promising outcomes: DeepMig recommends both libraries and code; by several projects, it retrieves a perfect match for the recommended items, obtaining an accuracy of 1.0. Moreover, being fed with proper training data, DeepMig provides comparable code migration steps of a static API migrator, a baseline for the code migration task.

Conclusion:

We conclude that DeepMig is capable of recommending both TPL and API migration, providing developers with a practical tool to migrate the entire project.