Nowadays,more and more Android developers prefer to seek help from Q&A website like Stack Overflow,despite the rich official documentation.Several researches have studied the limitations of the official applicatio...Nowadays,more and more Android developers prefer to seek help from Q&A website like Stack Overflow,despite the rich official documentation.Several researches have studied the limitations of the official application programming interface(API)documentations and proposed approaches to improve them.However,few of them digged into the requirements of the third-party developers to study this.In this work,we gain insight into this question from multidimensional perspectives of API developers and API users by a kind of cross-validation.We propose a hybrid approach,which combines manual inspection on artifacts and online survey on corresponding developers,to explore the different focus between these two types of stakeholders.In our work,we manually inspect 1000 posts and receive 319 questionnaires in total.Through the mutual verification of the inspection and survey process,we found that the users are more concerned with the usage of API,while the official documentation mainly provides functional description.Furthermore,we identified 9 flaws of the official documentation and summarized 12 aspects(from the content to the representation)for promotion to improve the official API documentations.展开更多
API(application programming interface)documentation is critical for developers to learn APIs.However,it is unclear whether API documentation indeed improves the API learnability for developers.In this paper,we focus o...API(application programming interface)documentation is critical for developers to learn APIs.However,it is unclear whether API documentation indeed improves the API learnability for developers.In this paper,we focus on two types of API documentation,i.e.,official API tutorials and API crowd documentation.First,we analyze API coverage and check API consistencies in API documentation based on the API traceability.Then,we conduct a survey and extract several characteristics to analyze which API documentation can help developers learn APIs.Our findings show that:1)API crowd documentation can be regarded as a supplement to the official API tutorials to some extent;2)the concerns for frequently-used APIs between different types of API documentation show a huge mismatch,which may prevent developers from deeply understanding the usages of APIs through only one type of API documentation;3)official API tutorials can help developers seek API information on a long page and API crowd documentation could provide long codes for a particular programming task.These findings may help developers select the suitable API documentation and find the useful information they need.展开更多
基金Project(2018-YFB1004202)supported by the National Key R&D Program of ChinaProject(61702534)supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China
文摘Nowadays,more and more Android developers prefer to seek help from Q&A website like Stack Overflow,despite the rich official documentation.Several researches have studied the limitations of the official application programming interface(API)documentations and proposed approaches to improve them.However,few of them digged into the requirements of the third-party developers to study this.In this work,we gain insight into this question from multidimensional perspectives of API developers and API users by a kind of cross-validation.We propose a hybrid approach,which combines manual inspection on artifacts and online survey on corresponding developers,to explore the different focus between these two types of stakeholders.In our work,we manually inspect 1000 posts and receive 319 questionnaires in total.Through the mutual verification of the inspection and survey process,we found that the users are more concerned with the usage of API,while the official documentation mainly provides functional description.Furthermore,we identified 9 flaws of the official documentation and summarized 12 aspects(from the content to the representation)for promotion to improve the official API documentations.
基金the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No.2018YFB1003900the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos.61722202,61772107 and 61572097the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant No.DUT18JC08.
文摘API(application programming interface)documentation is critical for developers to learn APIs.However,it is unclear whether API documentation indeed improves the API learnability for developers.In this paper,we focus on two types of API documentation,i.e.,official API tutorials and API crowd documentation.First,we analyze API coverage and check API consistencies in API documentation based on the API traceability.Then,we conduct a survey and extract several characteristics to analyze which API documentation can help developers learn APIs.Our findings show that:1)API crowd documentation can be regarded as a supplement to the official API tutorials to some extent;2)the concerns for frequently-used APIs between different types of API documentation show a huge mismatch,which may prevent developers from deeply understanding the usages of APIs through only one type of API documentation;3)official API tutorials can help developers seek API information on a long page and API crowd documentation could provide long codes for a particular programming task.These findings may help developers select the suitable API documentation and find the useful information they need.
