Don't Reinvent the Wheel: Towards Automatic Replacement of Custom Implementations with APIs

TL;DR

This paper introduces RETIWA, a tool designed to automatically identify custom code implementations in software projects that can be replaced with open source APIs, aiming to enhance code reuse and reduce bugs.

Contribution

It presents a novel mining strategy to automatically extract custom implementation-to-API replacements from open source projects, forming the basis for an automated recommender system.

Findings

Developed a reliable mining strategy for replacements

Created a knowledge base of implementation-API pairs

Laid groundwork for an automatic replacement recommender

Abstract

Reusing code is a common practice in software development: It helps developers speedup the implementation task while also reducing the chances of introducing bugs, given the assumption that the reused code has been tested, possibly in production. Despite these benefits, opportunities for reuse are not always in plain sight and, thus, developers may miss them. We present our preliminary steps in building RETIWA, a recommender able to automatically identify custom implementations in a given project that are good candidates to be replaced by open source APIs. RETIWA relies on a ``knowledge base'' consisting of real examples of custom implementation-to-API replacements. In this work, we present the mining strategy we tailored to automatically and reliably extract replacements of custom implementations with APIs from open source projects. This is the first step towards building the envisioned recommender.