How API Documentation Fails

Formal documentation can be a crucial resource for learning to how to use an API. However, producing high-quality documentation can be nontrivial. Researchers investigated how 10 common documentation problems manifested themselves in practice. The results are based on two surveys of a total of 323 p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE software Vol. 32; no. 4; pp. 68 - 75
Main Authors Uddin, Gias, Robillard, Martin P.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Alamitos IEEE 01.07.2015
IEEE Computer Society
Subjects
API
Application programming interface
Application programming interfaces
Documentation
Failure analysis
Software development
software engineering
Studies
Uniform resource locators
user study
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Summary:Formal documentation can be a crucial resource for learning to how to use an API. However, producing high-quality documentation can be nontrivial. Researchers investigated how 10 common documentation problems manifested themselves in practice. The results are based on two surveys of a total of 323 professional software developers and analysis of 179 API documentation units. The three severest problems were ambiguity, incompleteness, and incorrectness of content. The respondents often mentioned six of the 10 problems as "blockers"' that forced them to use another API.
Bibliography:SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 14
ISSN:0740-7459
1937-4194
DOI:10.1109/MS.2014.80