Improving API usability

Myers, Brad A.; Stylos, Jeffrey

doi:10.1145/2896587

Cited by 203 publications

(99 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…They propose several metrics that help to either design or recognise "good" APIs. API usability and design is also discussed by Myers and Stylos in [32]. Scheller [43] tries to automatically measure the usability of API in terms of interface complexity -complexity of methods, constructors, fields, etc.…”

Section: Api Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

API Evolution and Compatibility: A Data Corpus and Tool Evaluation.

Jezek¹,

Dietrich²

2017

JOT

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The development of software components with independent release cycles is nowadays widely supported by multiple languages and frameworks. A critical feature of any such platform is to safeguard composition by ensuring backward compatibility of substituted components. In recent years, some tooling has been developed to help developers and DevOps engineers to establish whether components are backward compatible by means of static analysis. We investigate the state of the art in this space by benchmarking such tools for Java. For this purpose, we have developed a compact benchmark data set of less than 200KB. Using this dataset, we study possible API changes of Java libraries, and whether the tools investigated can detect them. We find that only a small number of tools suitable to analyse API evolution exist. Those tools are only infrequently maintained by small communities. All tools investigated have some shortcomings in that they fail to detect certain API incompatibilities.

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Section: Api Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

API Evolution and Compatibility: A Data Corpus and Tool Evaluation.

Jezek¹,

Dietrich²

2017

JOT

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“…and the plot displays the values of coverage n (...) for each one within the range [1,20]. The x-axes of the plots represent the number of x-most ranking predictions, whereas the y-axes represent the coverage obtained with the first x predictions.…”

Section: Coveragementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The study of API usability has gained attention in the research community [1], since efficient and correct use of third-party APIs is not easily achievable with mainstream development practices and tools. On the one hand, API usability was studied through empirical experiments (e.g., [2,3,4,5,6]), which revealed the types of barriers that API users face (e.g., relationships between types and instantiation of abstract types).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stepwise API usage assistance using n -gram language models

Santos

Prendi

Sousa

et al. 2017

Journal of Systems and Software

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Reusing software involves learning third-party APIs, a process that is often time-consuming and error-prone. Recommendation systems for API usage assistance based on statistical models built from source code corpora are capable of assisting API users through code completion mechanisms in IDEs. A valid sequence of API calls involving different types may be regarded as a well-formed sentence of tokens from the API vocabulary. In this article we describe an approach for recommending subsequent tokens to complete API sentences using n-gram language models built from source code corpora. The provided system was integrated in the code completion facilities of the Eclipse IDE, providing contextualized completion proposals for Java taking into account the nearest lines of code. The approach was evaluated against existing client code of four widely used APIs, revealing that in more than 90% of the cases the expected subsequent token is within the 10-top-most proposals of our models. The high score provides evidence that the recommendations could help on API learning and exploration, namely through the assistance on writing valid API sentences.

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“…One of the main reasons for this failure is that some security mechanisms are not easily learnable and understandable to programmers, and they find it difficult to use those mechanisms correctly when developing applications (Wurster & van Oorschot, 2009). Specially, security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that provide the interface for programmers to access security mechanisms are often not usable (Acar et al, 2016) (Wurster & van Oorschot, 2009) (Myers & Stylos, 2016). Therefore, programmers may end up using them incorrectly and hence, results in introducing security vulnerabilities to the applications they develop.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If the usability of security APIs can be improved, it will help programmers develop more secure applications and therefore, will help prevent possible cyber-attacks and data breaches (Acar et al, 2016) (Myers & Stylos, 2016). However, so far security API developers have failed to develop security APIs in a way that programmers who are using security APIs will find them usable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Generic Cognitive Dimensions Questionnaire to Evaluate the Usability of Security APIs

Wijayarathna

Arachchilage

Slay

2017

Human Aspects of Information Security, Privacy and Trust

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Usability issues that exist in security APIs cause programmers to embed those security APIs incorrectly to the applications they develop. This results in introduction of security vulnerabilities to those applications. One of the main reasons for security APIs to be not usable is currently there is no proper method by which the usability issues of security APIs can be identified. We conducted a study to assess the effectiveness of the cognitive dimensions questionnaire based usability evaluation methodology in evaluating the usability of security APIs. We used a cognitive dimensions based generic questionnaire to collect feedback from programmers who participated in the study. Results revealed interesting facts about the prevailing usability issues in four commonly used security APIs and the capability of the methodology to identify those issues.

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Improving API usability

Abstract: Human-centered design can make application programming interfaces easier for developers to use.

Cited by 203 publications

References 25 publications

API Evolution and Compatibility: A Data Corpus and Tool Evaluation.

API Evolution and Compatibility: A Data Corpus and Tool Evaluation.

Stepwise API usage assistance using n -gram language models

A Generic Cognitive Dimensions Questionnaire to Evaluate the Usability of Security APIs

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