On Designing Better Tools for Learning APIs
This work addresses the problem of inefficient API learning for software developers, but it is incremental as it focuses on design insights rather than a new solution.
The study investigated the inadequacy of current API learning materials for developers, identifying key design implications such as trustworthiness, confidentiality, and the need for code examples based on feedback from 19 professional developers.
Modern software development requires a large investment in learning application programming interfaces (APIs). Recent research found that the learning materials themselves are often inadequate: developers struggle to find answers beyond simple usage scenarios. Solving these problems requires a large investment in tool and search engine development. To understand where further investment would be most useful, we ran a study with 19 professional developers to understand what a solution might look like, free of technical constraints. In this paper, we report on design implications of tools for API learning, grounded in the reality of the professional developers themselves. The reoccurring themes in the participants' feedback were trustworthiness, confidentiality, information overload and the need for code examples as first-class documentation artifacts.