API Topic Issues Indexing, Exploration and Discovery for API Community Knowledge

Ajam, George; Rodríguez, Carlos; Benatallah, Boualem

doi:10.1109/clei52000.2020.00028

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…This is partly due to the heterogeneous and fragmented information found across different sources, making it difficult for querying, exploration and understanding purposes. In this article, we extend our previous work [28] and present a systematic study of the literature that led us to identify key quality dimensions of API documentation. More specifically, we explored the literature through an SMS [29] that helped us identify such key dimensions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…The Web has substantially changed the way APIs are documented [20]. Q&A websites [14], social media [20] and even video tutorials [38] are nowadays widely used to document both software in general and APIs in particular [28,39]. Regardless of its significant role in the software development process, API documentation face several quality issues that can drive developers off an API and force them to use a different one [34].…”

Section: Quality Dimensions Of Api Documentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Scout-bot: Leveraging API Community Knowledge for Exploration and Discovery of API Learning Resources

Ajam

Rodríguez

Benatallah

2021

CLEIej

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Application Programming Interface (API) is a core technology that facilitates developers’ productivity by enabling the reuse of software components. Understanding APIs and gaining knowledge about their usage are therefore fundamental needs for developers. Here, API documentation plays a pivotal role in enabling developers to take full advantage of the benefits brought by APIs. The quality of API documentation has therefore become an important concern given the celerity and dynamics at which APIs are now being made available to users. This article aims at exploring existing research in the area of API documentation in order to identify the associated quality dimensions addressed by the literature. The research is carried out as a systematic mapping study where 103 research papers selected from the literature were reviewed and a total of 5 core quality dimensions were identified and analyzed. By focusing on the two most relevant quality dimensions (understandability and completeness), this article presents an approach to enable API users to explore, discover and learn about APIs through API topic issues discussed in Stack Overflow (SO). We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through Scout-bot, our tool for exploration and discovery of API topic issues.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 71%