Understanding How and Why Developers Seek and Analyze API-related Opinions

TL;DR

This study investigates how developers seek, evaluate, and utilize opinions about APIs from online forums, highlighting their needs for automated tools to assess review trustworthiness and aid in API decision-making.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into developers' needs for API opinion analysis and explores the potential of automated tools to support this process.

Findings

Developers seek API reviews for various development needs.

Trustworthiness assessment of opinions is a key concern.

Automated tools can help save time and improve decision quality.

Abstract

With the advent and proliferation of online developer forums as informal documentation, developers often share their opinions about the APIs they use. Thus, opinions of others often shape the developer's perception and decisions related to software development. For example, the choice of an API or how to reuse the functionality the API offers are, to a considerable degree, conditioned upon what other developers think about the API. While many developers refer to and rely on such opinion-rich information about APIs, we found little research that investigates the use and benefits of public opinions. To understand how developers seek and evaluate API opinions, we conducted two surveys involving a total of 178 software developers. We analyzed the data in two dimensions, each corresponding to specific needs related to API reviews: (1) Needs for seeking API reviews, and (2) Needs for automated tool support to assess the reviews. We observed that developers seek API reviews and often have to summarize those for diverse development needs (e.g., API suitability). Developers also make conscious efforts to judge the trustworthiness of the provided opinions and believe that automated tool support for API reviews analysis can assist in diverse development scenarios, including, for example, saving time in API selection as well as making informed decisions on a particular API features.