research-article

Measuring API documentation on the web

Authors:

Christoph TreudeAuthors Info & Claims

Web2SE '11: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering

Pages 25 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/1984701.1984706

Published: 24 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Software development blogs, developer forums and Q&A websites are changing the way software is documented. With these tools, developers can create and communicate knowledge and experiences without relying on a central authority to provide official documentation. Instead, any content created by a developer is just a web search away. To understand whether documentation via social media can replace or augment more traditional forms of documentation, we study the extent to which the methods of one particular API - jQuery - are documented on the Web. We analyze 1,730 search results and show that software development blogs in particular cover 87.9% of the API methods, mainly featuring tutorials and personal experiences about using the methods. Further, this effort is shared by a large group of developers contributing just a few blog posts. Our findings indicate that social media is more than a niche in software documentation, that it can provide high levels of coverage and that it gives readers a chance to engage with authors.

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Cited By

Anwar ZAfzal HKadry SCheng X(2024)Semantic Web Approaches in Stack OverflowInternational Journal on Semantic Web & Information Systems10.4018/IJSWIS.35861720:1(1-61)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/IJSWIS.358617
Seredko AHillman T(2024)What Does a Downvote Do? Performing Complementary and Competing Knowledge Practices on an Online PlatformProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36536928:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3653692
Serbout SPautasso CSpinellis DConstantinou EBacchelli A(2024)APIstic: A Large Collection of OpenAPI MetricsProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3643991.3644932(265-277)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643991.3644932
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Measuring API documentation on the web
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Documentation

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

Web2SE '11: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering

May 2011

44 pages

ISBN:9781450305952

DOI:10.1145/1984701

Program Chairs:
Christoph Treude
University of Victoria, Canada
,
Margaret-Anne Storey
University of Victoria, Canada
,
Arie van Deursen
Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
,
Andrew Begel
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Sue Black
University College London, UK

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 24 May 2011

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ICSE11

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ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 24, 2011

HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

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2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Cited By

Anwar ZAfzal HKadry SCheng X(2024)Semantic Web Approaches in Stack OverflowInternational Journal on Semantic Web & Information Systems10.4018/IJSWIS.35861720:1(1-61)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/IJSWIS.358617
Seredko AHillman T(2024)What Does a Downvote Do? Performing Complementary and Competing Knowledge Practices on an Online PlatformProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36536928:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3653692
Serbout SPautasso CSpinellis DConstantinou EBacchelli A(2024)APIstic: A Large Collection of OpenAPI MetricsProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3643991.3644932(265-277)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643991.3644932
Cai JLin YZhang HCarroll J(2024)Third-Party Developers and Tool Development For Community Management on Live Streaming Platform TwitchProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642787(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642787
Arya DGuo JRobillard M(2024)Properties and Styles of Software Technology TutorialsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.333256850:2(159-172)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3332568
Ndukwe ILicorish SMacDonell S(2023)Perceptions on the Utility of Community Question and Answer Websites Like Stack Overflow to Software DevelopersIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.322023649:4(2413-2425)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3220236
Rutishauser RMeyer AHolmes RFritz T(2023)Semi-Automatic, Inline and Collaborative Web Page Code Curations2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00159(1866-1877)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00159
Moghaddam RGarg SClement CMohylevskyy YSundaresan NZhang ARangwala H(2022)Generating Examples from CLI Usage: Can Transformers Help?Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3534678.3549983(3575-3583)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3534678.3549983
Williams ABuchan J(2022)Using the case survey methodology for finding high-quality grey literature in software engineeringProceedings of the 26th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3530019.3530020(1-9)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3530019.3530020
Arab MLaToza TLiang JKo A(2022)An Exploratory Study of Sharing Strategic Programming KnowledgeProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3502070(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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