A Systematic Review of API Evolution Literature

Abstract

Recent software advances have led to an expansion of the development and usage of application programming interfaces (APIs). From millions of Android packages (APKs) available on Google Store to millions of open-source packages available in Maven, PyPI, and npm, APIs have become an integral part of software development. Like any software artifact, software APIs evolve and suffer from this evolution. Prior research has uncovered many challenges to the development, usage, and evolution of APIs. While some challenges have been studied and solved, many remain. These challenges are scattered in the literature, which hides advances and cloaks the remaining challenges. In this systematic literature review on APIs and API evolution, we uncover and describe publication trends and trending topics. We compile common research goals, evaluation methods, metrics, and subjects. We summarize the current state-of-the-art and outline known existing challenges as well as new challenges uncovered during this review. We conclude that the main remaining challenges related to APIs and API evolution are (1) automatically identifying and leveraging factors that drive API changes, (2) creating and using uniform benchmarks for research evaluation, and (3) understanding the impact of API evolution on API developers and users with respect to various programming languages.