What Should Developers Be Aware Of? An Empirical Study on the Directives of API Documentation
Martin Monperrus (INRIA Lille - Nord Europe), Michael Eichberg, Elif, Tekes, Mira Mezini
TL;DR
This paper presents an empirical study on API directives in object-oriented library documentation, proposing a detailed taxonomy of 23 directive types to improve developer awareness and API usage understanding.
Contribution
It introduces a comprehensive taxonomy of 23 API directive types, based on empirical analysis of API documentation, enhancing understanding of developer guidance.
Findings
Identified 23 distinct types of API directives.
Provided insights into how directives influence developer understanding.
Established a taxonomy to categorize API directives systematically.
Abstract
Application Programming Interfaces (API) are exposed to developers in order to reuse software libraries. API directives are natural-language statements in API documentation that make developers aware of constraints and guidelines related to the usage of an API. This paper presents the design and the results of an empirical study on the directives of API documentation of object-oriented libraries. Its main contribution is to propose and extensively discuss a taxonomy of 23 kinds of API directives.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.