What should I document? A preliminary systematic mapping study into API documentation knowledge
This work addresses the problem of improving API documentation for software developers, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing studies into a framework.
The study tackled the lack of a structured taxonomy for API documentation quality by conducting a systematic mapping review of 21 works, resulting in a five-dimensional taxonomy based on 34 weighted recommendations that highlight usage descriptions, design rationale, and presentation as key helpful elements.
Background: Good API documentation facilities the development process, improving productivity and quality. While the topic of API documentation quality has been of interest for the last two decades, there have been few studies to map the specific constructs needed to create a good document. In effect, we still need a structured taxonomy against which to capture knowledge. Aims: This study reports emerging results of a systematic mapping study. We capture key conclusions from previous studies that assess API documentation quality, and synthesise the results into a single framework. Method: By conducting a systematic review of 21 key works, we have developed a five dimensional taxonomy based on 34 categorised weighted recommendations. Results: All studies utilise field study techniques to arrive at their recommendations, with seven studies employing some form of interview and questionnaire, and four conducting documentation analysis. The taxonomy we synthesise reinforces that usage description details (code snippets, tutorials, and reference documents) are generally highly weighted as helpful in API documentation, in addition to design rationale and presentation. Conclusions: We propose extensions to this study aligned to developer's utility for each of the taxonomy's categories.