Towards crowd-sourced API documentation
Pages 310 - 311
Abstract
The learnability of an API suffers when the official documentation of the API is incomplete. Developers discuss usage scenarios of APIs in the online developer forums. As such, by automatically mining such crowd-sourced documentation of APIs, we can address the shortcomings of API official documentation. We present a framework to automatically mine usage scenarios about APIs from online developer forums. Each usage scenario of an API consists of a code example, a summary description, and the reactions (i.e., positive and negative opinions) of other developers towards the code example. We evaluate our API usage mining framework by producing a benchmark dataset. We observed a precision of 0.947 and a recall of 1.0 with the linking of a code example to an API mention in the forum.
References
[1]
M. P. Robillard and R. DeLine, "A field study of API learning obstacles," Empirical Software Engineering, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 703--732, 2011.
[2]
G. Uddin and M. P. Robillard, "How API documentation fails," IEEE Softawre, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 76--83, 2015.
[3]
S. Subramanian, L. Inozemtseva, and R. Holmes, "Live API documentation," in Proc. 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2014, p. 10.
[4]
C. Treude and M. P. Robillard, "Augmenting API documentation with insights from stack overflow," in Proc. 38th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2016, pp. 392--403.
[5]
J. M. Carroll, P. L. Smith-Kerker, J. R. Ford, and S. A. Mazur-Rimetz, "The minimal manual," Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 123--153, 1987.
[6]
H. Phan, H. A. Nguyen, N. M. Tran, L. H. Truong, A. T. Nguyen, and T. N. Nguyen, "Statistical learning of api fully qualified names in code snippets of online forums," in Proceedings of 40th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2018, pp. 632--642.
[7]
B. Dagenais and M. P. Robillard, "Recovering traceability links between an API and its learning resources," in Proc. 34th IEEE/ACM Intl. Conf. on Software Engineering, 2012, pp. 45--57.
[8]
G. Uddin and M. P. Robillard, "Automatic resolution of API mentions in informal documents," in McGill Technical Report, 2017, p. 6.
Recommendations
Use at your own risk: the Java unsafe API in the wild
OOPSLA '15Java is a safe language. Its runtime environment provides strong safety guarantees that any Java application can rely on. Or so we think. We show that the runtime actually does not provide these guarantees---for a large fraction of today's Java code. ...
API documentation and software community values: a survey of open-source API documentation
SIGDOC '13: Proceedings of the 31st ACM international conference on Design of communicationStudies of what software developers need from API documentation have reported consistent findings over the years; however, these studies all used similar methods--usually a form of observation or survey. Our study looks at API documentation as artifacts ...
Use at your own risk: the Java unsafe API in the wild
OOPSLA 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and ApplicationsJava is a safe language. Its runtime environment provides strong safety guarantees that any Java application can rely on. Or so we think. We show that the runtime actually does not provide these guarantees---for a large fraction of today's Java code. ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
May 2019
369 pages
- Conference Chair:
- Gunter Mussbacher,
- General Chair:
- Joanne M. Atlee,
- Program Chair:
- Tevfik Bultan
Sponsors
- SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
- IEEE-CS: Computer Society
Publisher
IEEE Press
Publication History
Published: 25 May 2019
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Conference
ICSE '19
Sponsor:
- SIGSOFT
- IEEE-CS
ICSE '19: 41st International Conference on Software Engineering
May 25 - 31, 2019
Quebec, Montreal, Canada
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%
Upcoming Conference
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 51Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)6
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 19 Nov 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in