API Topics Issues in Stack Overflow Q&amp;As Posts: An Empirical Study

Ajam, George; Rodríguez, Carlos; Benatallah, Boualem

doi:10.1109/clei52000.2020.00024

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…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%

“…It features a vast repository of programming knowledge including approximately 21 million questions, 32 million anwers, 15 million users and 11 million visitors per day, as of April 2021. 8 Study [39] has shown that API-related posts in SO can be categorized into topic issues such as API security, API usage, API Debugging, among other topics issues. In this section, we present our data model to represent, enrich and index API-related posts in SO based on such topic issues, in order to support discovery and understanding of API-related knowledge.…”

Section: Modeling Curation and Indexing Of Api Community Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As explained before, such list of mentions can be obtained from existing list of APIs available on the Web (see footnote 13). Additionally, in order to assign topics to each post extracted from SO, we use a list API-topic-issues seed keywords, e.g., based on the topics listed in [39]. Such list of seed keywords are expanded with alternative mentions obtained from a pre-trained word embedding based on SO [130].…”

mentioning

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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