What Should Developers Be Aware Of? An Empirical Study on the Directives of API Documentation
Authors:
- Martin MonperrusMMMartin Monperrus
- Michael EichbergMEMichael Eichberg
- Elif TekesETElif Tekes
- Mira MeziniMMMira Mezini
Preprint
Abstract
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.Keywords
All Related Versions
- Version 1, 2012-05-29, ArXiv
- Published version: Empirical Software Engineering, 17 (6), 703.
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