Detecting API usage obstacles: A study of iOS and Android developer questions

Abstract

Abstract-Software frameworks provide sets of generic functionalities that can be later customized for a specific task. When developers invoke API methods in a framework, they often encounter obstacles in finding the correct usage of the API, let alone to employ best practices. Previous research addresses this line of questions by mining API usage patterns to induce API usage templates, by conducting and compiling interviews of developers, and by inferring correlations among APIs. In this paper, we analyze API-related posts regarding iOS and Android development from a Q&A website, stackoverf low.com. Assuming that API-related posts are primarily about API usage obstacles, we find several iOS and Android API classes that appear to be particularly likely to challenge developers, even after we factor out API usage hotspots, inferred by modelling API usage of open source iOS and Android applications. For each API with usage obstacles, we further apply a topic mining tool to posts that are tagged with the API, and we discover several repetitive scenarios in which API usage obstacles occur. We consider our work as a stepping stone towards understanding API usage challenges based on forum-based input from a multitude of developers, input that is prohibitively expensive to collect through interviews. Our method helps to motivate future research in API usage, and can allow designers of platforms -such as iOS and Android -to better understand the problems developers have in using their platforms, and to make corresponding improvements.

Accessing Inaccessible Android APIs: An Empirical Study

“…Wang et al [40] investigated the obstacles of using Android APIs through analyzing API-related posts regarding Android development from Stack Overflow, a Q&A web site. Parnin et al [41] also based on Stack Overflow to investigate how these kind of Q&A web sites facilitate crowd documentation.…”

Who asked what: integrating crowdsourced FAQs into API documentation

“…Knowing what questions others have asked about an API helps developers not only acquire new knowledge, but also gain expertise in asking good questions. Even unanswered questions are valuable, because they can locate API learning obstacles and deficient documentation [3,18].…”

“…Social Q&A Web sites (e.g., Stack Overflow 2 ) and search engine logs can also tell what questions are asked, but usually do not track who viewed what questions or provide information at a team or project level [1,3,18]. We hypothesize that developers in the same team or project tend to have more common information needs, and knowledge is more reusable in smaller groups [4].…”

“…Team leads may be interested in the questions frequently asked by the team, especially those not answered, because they can pinpoint technical obstacles of the team [18]. Considering that developers in the same team or project have more common questions [4], we expect our approach to be more effective at a team or project level.…”

“…API designers may also be informed of potential design issues, as frequent questions on an API may have roots in the design in addition to the lack of documentation [18].…”