An Empirical Study on Evolution of API Documentation
نویسندگان
چکیده
With the evolution of an API library, its documentation also evolves. The evolution of API documentation is common knowledge for programmers and library developers, but not in a quantitative form. Without such quantitative knowledge, programmers may neglect important revisions of API documentation, and library developers may not effectively improve API documentation based on its revision histories. There is a strong need to conduct a quantitative study on API documentation evolution. However, as API documentation is large in size and revisions can be complicated, it is quite challenging to conduct such a study. In this paper, we present an analysis methodology to analyze the evolution of API documentation. Based on the methodology, we conduct a quantitative study on API documentation evolution of five widely used real-world libraries. The results reveal various valuable findings, and these findings allow programmers and library developers to better understand API documentation evolution.
منابع مشابه
Where does Google find API documentation?
The documentation of popular APIs is spread across many formats, from vendor-curated reference documentation to Stack Overflow threads. For developers, it is often not obvious from where a particular piece of information can be retrieved. To understand this documentation landscape, we systematically conducted Google searches for the elements of ten popular APIs. We found that their documentatio...
متن کاملCrowd Documentation: Exploring the Coverage and the Dynamics of API Discussions on Stack Overflow
Traditionally, many types of software documentation, such as API documentation, require a process where a few people write for many potential users. The resulting documentation, when it exists, is often of poor quality and lacks sufficient examples and explanations. In this paper, we report on an empirical study to investigate how Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, faci...
متن کاملDeveloping a Model for Agile Supply: an Empirical Study from Iranian Pharmaceutical Supply Chain
Agility is the fundamental characteristic of a supply chain needed for survival in turbulent markets, where environmental forces create additional uncertainty resulting in higher risk in the supply chain management. In addition, agility helps providing the right product, at the right time to the consumer. The main goal of this research is therefore to promote supplier selection in pharmaceutica...
متن کاملDeveloping a Model for Agile Supply: an Empirical Study from Iranian Pharmaceutical Supply Chain
Agility is the fundamental characteristic of a supply chain needed for survival in turbulent markets, where environmental forces create additional uncertainty resulting in higher risk in the supply chain management. In addition, agility helps providing the right product, at the right time to the consumer. The main goal of this research is therefore to promote supplier selection in pharmaceutica...
متن کاملAutomatically Extracting Web API Specifications from HTML Documentation
Web API specifications are machine-readable descriptions of APIs. These specifications, in combination with related tooling, simplify and support the consumption of APIs. However, despite the increased distribution of web APIs, specifications are rare and their creation and maintenance heavily relies on manual efforts by third parties. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach and an asso...
متن کامل