2014/07/16 by Tiago Espinha, Espinha, Tiago, Andy Zaidman +4
Computer Science · #Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Software Testing and Debugging Techniques #cs.SE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1407.4266
Technical report
arxiv created 2014/07/16 · openalex publication_date 2014/07/16 · arxiv updated 2014/07/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.