What Should Developers Be Aware Of? An Empirical Study on the Directives of API Documentation
This work addresses the challenge for developers in effectively using APIs by providing a structured classification, though it is incremental as it builds on existing empirical methods.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding API directives in documentation by conducting an empirical study on object-oriented libraries, resulting in a proposed taxonomy of 23 kinds of directives.
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.