What should developers be aware of? An empirical study on the directives of API documentation

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Empirical software engineering : an international journal 2012-12, Vol.17 (6), p.703-737
Main Authors: Monperrus, Martin, Eichberg, Michael, Tekes, Elif, Mezini, Mira
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
API
Compilers
Computer Science
Developers
Documentation
Empirical analysis
Guidelines
Interpreters
Libraries
Object oriented
Object-oriented programming
Programming Languages
Software Engineering
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1382-3256
1573-7616
DOI:10.1007/s10664-011-9186-4