Visualization based API usage patterns refining

Learning to use existing or new software libraries is a difficult task for software developers, which would impede their productivity. Most of existing work provided different techniques to mine API usage patterns from client programs, in order to help developers to understand and use existing libraries. However, considering only client programs to identify API usage patterns, is a strong constraint as collecting several similar client programs for an API is not a trivial task. And even if these clients are available, all the usage scenarios of the API of interest may not be covered by those clients. In this paper, we propose a visualization based approach for the refinement of Client-based Usage Patterns. We first visualize the patterns structure. Then we enrich the patterns with API methods that are semantically related to them, and thus may contribute together to the implementation of a particular functionality for potential client programs.