Call for Papers

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are an essential mechanism for software reuse on many levels, such as libraries or web services. However, over the past two decades, many researchers have shown inherent problems with APIs, such as providing useful documentation for proper use, detecting correct usage patterns or wrong usages, and migrating between API versions. While these efforts have advanced the state of the art, most of these problems still exist today. We believe it is time to reflect and compare experiences from different perspectives and to come up with new solutions to the above challenges.

The 2nd International Workshop on API Usage and Evolution (WAPI) provides a venue for researchers and practitioners to come together and discuss the open challenges that API users and designers face. For example, how can we measure the quality of an API? How can we accurately rely on client code for identifying patterns when the rule of ``the majority do it right’’ does not always hold (e.g., in security-related APIs)? What is the best way to present API recommendations and API usages to a developer? The goal of the workshop is to identify the current open challenges in the area and define a roadmap for innovative solutions. Together with all workshop participants, we aim to publish this roadmap as a New Ideas Paper, e.g., in ASE’18, ICSE’19, SANER’19, or FSE’19. Before the workshop, the organizers will derive questions from the accepted papers and ask participants for feedback. This will serve as a framework for workshop discussions. After the workshop, the organizers will draft a respective publication from the results of the discussions and ask participants to contribute to it.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• API design
• API specification/documentation
• API quality metrics
• API usage recommendation
• API misuse detection
• API maintenance
• API evolution and migration
• Evolution of API documentation
• Leveraging different sources of data to perform/support any of the above tasks
• Suitable representations for usage patterns
• User-friendly ways of presenting API and API-usage recommendations to the developer
• User or designer perspectives of API usage and evolution
• Negative experiences (what did not work)
• Identification of open challenges and proposed solutions
• Transfer of approaches between different types of APIs, such as library APIs or web APIs
• Synergies between API-research challenges and other research areas

Submission Information

WAPI 2018 invites contributions in the form of 4-page papers from both researchers and practitioners, as well as talk abstracts from practitioners. Submissions can be research papers, practice papers, position papers, or experience reports. All submissions should describe unpublished work and must have been neither previously accepted for publication nor concurrently submitted for review in another journal, book, conference, or workshop. All submission must follow the ACM formatting instructions. Submissions are peer-reviewed and accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. All submissions should be made through EasyChair.

Important Dates

Submissions due

Monday February 5th 2018

Notification to authors

Monday March 5th 2018

Camera-ready copies due

Monday March 19th 2018

The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2018. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.