Several common mistakes that programmers commit while writing asynchronous (async) programs are addressed in this paper. First, the authors discuss the different kinds of async programs available (call based and task asynchronous pattern (TAP) based). The errors are caused by the misuse of async methods, which hurts performance and might cause serious problems like deadlocks. Examples are fire and forget async methods that cannot be waited on to get any useful result, and long-running async methods. Second, they introduce the async-await idiom (recently introduced). Third, they study common errors that programmers commit while using these application programming interfaces (APIs) and propose an automated solution to correct them.

The paper’s approach to using automated tools for converting callback-based code to async code deserves special mention. Such optimizations are hard to implement automatically and the paper succeeds at this.

Another strong point of the paper is the fact that the authors use a vast number of real-world Windows Phone apps to derive their conclusions. Overall, the paper is very useful for Android app developers and researchers building automated tools for Android app development.