Open AccessScout-bot: Leveraging API Community Knowledge for Exploration and Discovery of API Learning Resources
Author(s) -
George Ajam,
Carlos Rodríguez,
Boualem Benatallah
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
clei electronic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 0717-5000
DOI - 10.19153/cleiej.24.2.5
Subject(s) - documentation , application programming interface , computer science , reuse , world wide web , quality (philosophy) , software engineering , interface (matter) , software , data science , engineering , philosophy , epistemology , bubble , maximum bubble pressure method , parallel computing , programming language , waste management
Application Programming Interface (API) is a core technology that facilitates developers’ productivity by enabling the reuse of software components. Understanding APIs and gaining knowledge about their usage are therefore fundamental needs for developers. Here, API documentation plays a pivotal role in enabling developers to take full advantage of the benefits brought by APIs. The quality of API documentation has therefore become an important concern given the celerity and dynamics at which APIs are now being made available to users. This article aims at exploring existing research in the area of API documentation in order to identify the associated quality dimensions addressed by the literature. The research is carried out as a systematic mapping study where 103 research papers selected from the literature were reviewed and a total of 5 core quality dimensions were identified and analyzed. By focusing on the two most relevant quality dimensions (understandability and completeness), this article presents an approach to enable API users to explore, discover and learn about APIs through API topic issues discussed in Stack Overflow (SO). We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through Scout-bot, our tool for exploration and discovery of API topic issues.