8.1. Future work
We aim to extend our investigation to a wider range of API
providers and a larger selection of projects using these APIs.
Another aspect we want to consider in future work is to make use
of a change distilling tool such as proposed by Fluri and Gall (2006)
and categorize the different types of changes as to be able to determine the nature of each change as well as to quantify its relative
impact. Additionally, we aim to analyze whether web service API
changes impact open-source and closed-source applications differently. Do these closed-source projects apply more urgency to
their changes due to their paying customers? While the proposed
recommendations stem from having been successful in real-world
projects, an interesting aspect which we would like to further investigate is under which conditions these recommendations may in
fact not be applicable or may require adjustments.
Finally, we also want to investigate whether the closed-source
API providers’ policies differ from those of open-source APIs where
client developers have no direct say in the evolution process.