Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Published in:
Interpersonal Relationships, Leadership and Other Soft Skills in Software Development Projects: A Systematic Review Read chapter Read first chapter

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

API Documentation

A Conceptual Evaluation Model

Authors : Sergio Inzunza, Reyes Juárez-Ramírez, Samantha Jiménez

Published in: Trends and Advances in Information Systems and Technologies

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

Application Programming Interface (API) is packed functionality to solve specific tasks. In order for developers to learn to use its functionality, APIs include some kind of documentation. Documentation is an important part of the API itself, but, providing high-quality documentation is not a straightforward task. Nowadays, most of the documentation does not include the information expected by users. Another problem is the lack of comprehensive evaluation methods that can help creator to identify missing or incomplete elements in their documentation.
This papers presents a set of basic (minimum) elements that any API documentation should consider in order to provide target user the information they need to learn and make proper use of the provided functionality. Then through a survey, we collect the importance that software developers give to each basic element. Using the importance values collected, a conceptual API Documentation evaluation method is proposed that can be used by documentation creator to identify the weakness in their documentation. Finally, the model applicability is tested using it to evaluate some popular online API documentation for various domains.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe




 

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
previous chapter Online Social Networks Analysis Visualization Using Socii
next chapter Using Emotion Recognition in Intelligent Interface Design for Elderly Care
Footnotes
Literature
1.
Barth, M.: API Evaluation An overview of API evaluation techniques (2012)
2.
3.
Uddin, G., Robillard, M.P.: How API documentation fails. IEEE Softw. 32(4), 68–75 (2015)CrossRef
4.
Ellmann, M.: On the similarity of software development documentation. In: Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering - ESEC/FSE 2017, pp. 1030–1033 (2017)
5.
Zhou, Y., Gu, R., Chen, T., Huang, Z.: Analyzing APIs documentation and code to detect directive defects, May 2017
6.
Robillard, M.P., Chhetri, Y.B.: Recommending reference API documentation. Empir. Softw. Eng. 20(6), 1558–1586 (2015)CrossRef
7.
Watson, R., Mark Stamnes, M., Jeannot-Schroeder, J., Spyridakis, J.H.: API documentation and software community values. In: The 31st ACM International Conference, p. 165 (2013)
8.
Treude, C., Robillard, M.P.: Augmenting API documentation with insights from stack overflow. In: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering - ICSE 2016, pp. 392–403 (2016)
9.
Sillito, J., Begel, A.: App-directed learning: an exploratory study. In: 2013 6th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, CHASE 2013 - Proceedings, pp. 81–84 (2013)
10.
Gruenbaum, P.: “Hello World!” - A Coder’s Guide to Writing API Documentation (2014)
11.
Robillard, M.P., Deline, R.: A field study of API learning obstacles. Empir. Softw. Eng. 16(6), 703–732 (2011)CrossRef
12.
Bloch, J.: How to design a good API and why it matters. In: Companion to the 21st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on OOPSLA 2006, p. 506 (2006)
13.
Nykaza, J., Messinger, R., Boehme, F., Norman, C.L., Mace, M., Gordon, M.: what programmers really want: results of a needs assessment for SDK documentation, pp. 133–141 (2002)
14.
Watson, R., Stamnes, M., Jeannot-Schroeder, J., Spyridakis, J.H.: API documentation and software community values: a survey of open-source API documentation. In: Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, pp. 165–174. ACM (2013)
15.
Brandt, J., Guo, P.J., Lewenstein, J., Dontcheva, M., Klemmer, S.R.: Two studies of opportunistic programming: interleaving web foraging, learning, and writing code. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1589–1598. ACM (2009)
16.
Ponzanelli, L., Bavota, G., Mocci, A., Di Penta, M., Oliveto, R., Hasan, M., Russo, B., Haiduc, S., Lanza, M.: CodeTube: extracting relevant fragments from software development video tutorials luca. In: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering - ICSE 2016, pp. 261–272 (2016)
17.
Robillard, M., Walker, R., Zimmermann, T.: Recommendation systems for software engineering. IEEE Softw. 27(4), 80–86 (2010)CrossRef
18.
Rama, G.M., Kak, A.: Some structural measures of API usability. Softw. Pract. Exp. 45(1), 75–110 (2015)CrossRef
19.
20.
Monperrus, M., Eichberg, M., Tekes, E., Mezini, M.: What should developers be aware of? an empirical study on the directives of API documentation. Empir. Softw. Eng. 17(6), 703–737 (2012)CrossRef
21.
Zhong, H., Su, Z.: Detecting API documentation errors. In: ACM SIGPLAN Notices, vol. 48(10), pp. 803–816 (2013)CrossRef
22.
Jääskeläinen, R.: Think-aloud protocol. In: Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 1, pp. 371–373 (2010)CrossRef
23.
Wharton, C., Rieman, J., Lewis, C., Polson, P.: The cognitive walkthrough method: a practitioner’s guide. In: Usability Inspection Methods, pp. 105–140. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1994)
24.
Watson, R.B.: Development and application of a heuristic to assess trends in API documentation. In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication - SIGDOC 2012, p. 295 (2012)
25.
Jackson, M., Crouch, S., Baxter, R.: Software evaluation: criteria-based assessment, pp. 1–13 (2011)
Metadata
Title
API Documentation
Authors
Sergio Inzunza
Reyes Juárez-Ramírez
Samantha Jiménez
Copyright Year
2018
Book
Trends and Advances in Information Systems and Technologies

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-77711-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-77712-2

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77712-2_22

Premium Partner

    Image Credits