nach oben

Empirical Software Engineering

Erschienen in:

01.12.2011

A field study of API learning obstacles

verfasst von: Martin P. Robillard, Robert DeLine

Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering | Ausgabe 6/2011

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

Large APIs can be hard to learn, and this can lead to decreased programmer productivity. But what makes APIs hard to learn? We conducted a mixed approach, multi-phased study of the obstacles faced by Microsoft developers learning a wide variety of new APIs. The study involved a combination of surveys and in-person interviews, and collected the opinions and experiences of over 440 professional developers. We found that some of the most severe obstacles faced by developers learning new APIs pertained to the documentation and other learning resources. We report on the obstacles developers face when learning new APIs, with a special focus on obstacles related to API documentation. Our qualitative analysis elicited five important factors to consider when designing API documentation: documentation of intent; code examples; matching APIs with scenarios; penetrability of the API; and format and presentation. We analyzed how these factors can be interpreted to prioritize API documentation development efforts

Nächster Artikel Eliciting user requirements using Appreciative inquiry

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

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!

Jetzt informieren

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!

Jetzt informieren

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!

Jetzt informieren

Nur mit Berechtigung zugänglich

Details about the population of respondents can be found in a separate publication (Robillard 2009).

To test with sufficiently large partitions, we aggregated the Owning and Major categories, and the Experimental and Hobby respondents.

After correcting the p-values for the simultaneous testing of multiple hypotheses using Holm’s procedure (Westfall et al. 1999).

Drawn only from the follow-up survey, since the interview participants were selected from the exploratory survey.

A notable exception would be examples returned as the result of queries to code search engines.

Complexity is informally defined as a combination of length of the example and amount of interaction with the API.

Participants routinely used the terms “sample” and “example” interchangeably. In the quotes, the term “sample” does not necessarily refer to code samples as defined above.

Developer 14 was relatively new to the profession, but older than average in age.

Beaton J, Jeong SY, Xie Y, Stylos J, Myers BA (2008) Usability challenges for enterprise service-oriented architecture APIs. In: Proc. IEEE symp. visual languages and human-centric computing, pp 193–196

Berglund E (2003) Designing electronic reference documentation for software component libraries. J Syst Softw 68(1):65–75MathSciNetCrossRef

Bloch J (2006) How to design a good API and why it matters. In: Companion to the 21st ACM SIGPLAN symposium on object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, pp 505–506

Bore C, Bore S (2005) Profiling software API usability for consumer electronics. In: Digest of int’l conf. on consumer electronics, pp 155–156

Brandt J, Guo PJ, Lewenstein J, Dontcheva M, Klemmer SR (2009) Two studies of opportunistic programming: interleaving web foraging, learning, and writing code. In: Proc. 27th int’l conf. on human factors in computing systems, pp 1589–1598

Clarke S (2004) Measuring API usability. Dr Dobb’s Journal Special Windows/NET Supplement

Corbin J, Strauss A (2007) Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Sage Publications

Creswell JW (2007) Qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches. Sage Publications

Cwalina K, Abrams B (2009) Framework design guidelines: conventions, idioms, and patterns for reusable .NET Libraries, 2nd edn. Addison-Wesley

des Rivières J (2004) Eclipse APIs: lines in the sand. EclipseCon Technical Talk. http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/development/apis/Eclipse-APIs-Lines-in-the-Sand.pdf

Ellis B, Stylos J, Myers B (2007) The factory pattern in API design: a usability evaluation. In: Proc. 29th int’l conf. on software engineering, pp 302–312. doi:10.1109/ICSE.2007.85

Feilkas M, Ratiu D (2008) Ensuring well-behaved usage of APIs through syntactic constraints. In: Proc. 16th int’l conf. on program comprehension, pp 248–253

Fowler M (2002) Public versus published interfaces. IEEE Softw 19(2):18–19CrossRef

Holmes R, Walker RJ, Murphy GC (2006) Approximate structural context matching: an approach to recommend relevant examples. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 32(12):952–970CrossRef

Hou D (2008) Investigating the effects of framework design knowledge in example-based framework learning. In: Proc. 24th int’l conf. on software maintenance, pp 37–46

Hou D, Wong K, Hoover JH (2005) What can programmer questions tell us about frameworks? In: Proc. 13th int’l workshop on program comprehension, pp 87–96

Jeong SY, Xie Y, Beaton J, Myers BA, Stylos J, Ehret R, Karstens J, Efeoglu A, Busse DK (2009) Improving documentation for eSOA APIs through user studies. In: Proc. 2nd int’l symp. on end-user development. LNCS, vol 5435. Springer, pp 86–105

Knowles MS, Holton III EF, Swanson RA (2005) The adult learner, 6th edn. Butterworth-Heinemann

Ko AJ, Myers BA, Aung HH (2004) Six learning barriers in end-user programming systems. In: Proc. symp. on visual languages and human centric computing, pp 199–206

Ko AJ, DeLine R, Venolia G (2007) Information needs in collocated software development teams. In: Proc. 29th int’l conf. on software engineering, pp 344–353

Larman C (2001) Protected variation: the importance of being closed. IEEE Softw 18(3):89–91CrossRef

Lutters WG, Seaman CB (2007) Revealing actual documentation usage in software maintenance through war stories. Inf Softw Technol 49:576–587CrossRef

McLellan SG, Roesler AW, Tempest JT, Spinuzzi CI (1998) Building more usable APIs. IEEE Softw 15(3):78–86CrossRef

Nykaza J, Messinger R, Boehme F, Norman CL, Mace M, Gordon M (2002) What programmers really want: results of a needs assessment for SDK documentation. In: Proc. 20th annual ACM SIGDOC int’l conf. on computer documentation, pp 133–141

Olson M, Hergenhahn B (2008) Introduction to the theories of learning, 8th edn. Prentice Hall

Parnas DL (1972) On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules. Commun ACM 15(12):1053–1058CrossRef

Robillard MP (2009) What makes APIs hard to learn? The answers of developers. IEEE Softw (November/December):27–34

Rosson MB, Carroll JM (1996) The reuse of uses in Smalltalk programming. ACM Trans Comput-Hum Interact 3(3):219–253. doi:10.1145/234526.234530 CrossRef

Seaman CB (2002) The information gathering strategies of software maintainers. In: Proc. int’l conf. on software maintenance, pp 141–149

Shull F, Lanubile F, Basili VR (2000) Investigating reading techniques for object-oriented framework learning. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 26(11):1101–1118CrossRef

Sillito J, Murphy GC, Volder KD (2008) Asking and answering questions during a programming change task. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 34(4):434–451CrossRef

Stylos J, Clarke S (2007) Usability implications of requiring parameters in objects’ constructors. In: Proc. 29th int’l conf. on software engineering, pp 529–539

Stylos J, Myers BA (2007) Mapping the space of API design decisions. In: Proc. symp. on visual languages and human-centric computing, pp 50–60

Stylos J, Myers BA (2008) Implications of method placement on api learnability. In: Proc. 16th ACM SIGSOFT int’l symp. on the foundations of software engineering, pp 105–112

Stylos J, Graf B, Busse DK, Ziegler C, Karstens REJ (2008) A case study of API redesign for improved usability. In: Proc. symp. on visual languages and human-centric computing, pp 189–192

Tulach J (2008) Practical API Design: confessions of a Java framework architect. APress

Weiss RS (1994) Learning from strangers: the art and method of qualitative interview studies. The Free Press

Westfall PH, Tobias RD, Rom D, Wolfinger RD, Hochberg Y (1999) Multiple comparisons and multiple tests using the SAS system. SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC

Titel: A field study of API learning obstacles
verfasst von: Martin P. Robillard
Robert DeLine
Publikationsdatum: 01.12.2011
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering / Ausgabe 6/2011
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-010-9150-8

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"