Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: An Empirical Study on the Impact of Refactoring Activities on Evolving
  Client-Used APIs   Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain
evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library
developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially
when it impacts client users by breaking an API of the library. Objective: Our
work aims to understand how clients that use a library API are affected by
refactoring activities. We target popular libraries that potentially impact
more library client users. Method: We distinguish between library APIs based on
their client-usage (refereed to as client-used APIs) in order to understand the
extent to which API breakages relate to refactorings. Our tool-based approach
allows for a large-scale study across eight libraries (i.e., totaling 183
consecutive versions) with around 900 clients projects. Results: We find that
library maintainers are less likely to break client-used API classes.
Quantitatively, we find that refactoring activities break less than 37% of all
client-used APIs. In a more qualitative analysis, we show two documented cases
of where non-refactoring API breaking changes are motivated other maintenance
issues (i.e., bug fix and new features) and involve more complex refactoring
operations. Conclusion: Using our automated approach, we find that library
developers are less likely to break APIs and tend to break client-used APIs
when addressing these maintenance issues.

24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
13
The categories of this paper are: quant-ph
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
20
The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
37
The categories of this paper are: supr-con
23
The categories of this paper are: solv-int
7
The categories of this paper are: hep-th
17
The categories of this paper are: q-fin
2
The categories of this paper are: math
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
28
The categories of this paper are: alg-geom