Asking and answering questions about unfamiliar APIs: An exploratory study

Ekwa Duala-Ekoko, M. Robillard
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引用次数: 117

Abstract

The increasing size of APIs and the increase in the number of APIs available imply developers must frequently learn how to use unfamiliar APIs. To identify the types of questions developers want answered when working with unfamiliar APIs and to understand the difficulty they may encounter answering those questions, we conducted a study involving twenty programmers working on different programming tasks, using unfamiliar APIs. Based on the screen captured videos and the verbalization of the participants, we identified twenty different types of questions programmers ask when working with unfamiliar APIs, and provide new insights to the cause of the difficulties programmers encounter when answering questions about the use of APIs. The questions we have identified and the difficulties we observed can be used for evaluating tools aimed at improving API learning, and in identifying areas of the API learning process where tool support is missing, or could be improved.
询问和回答关于不熟悉的api的问题:一项探索性研究
api的大小和可用api数量的增加意味着开发人员必须经常学习如何使用不熟悉的api。为了确定开发人员在使用不熟悉的api时想要回答的问题类型,并了解他们在回答这些问题时可能遇到的困难,我们进行了一项涉及20名使用不熟悉的api从事不同编程任务的程序员的研究。根据屏幕捕获的视频和参与者的口述,我们确定了程序员在使用不熟悉的api时提出的20种不同类型的问题,并为程序员在回答有关api使用的问题时遇到的困难的原因提供了新的见解。我们已经确定的问题和我们观察到的困难可以用于评估旨在改进API学习的工具,并用于确定API学习过程中工具支持缺失或可以改进的领域。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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