A framework for extending usability engineering: API usability essentials: Extending usability via component-based platform

Abstract

Application Programming Interface (API) in software development acts as an important milestone for software productions. It is believed that API usability impacts upon ease-in-use, operationability and acceptability among its audience. Likewise, an ever increasing need for extending and integrating Usability Engineering (UE) has become vital for the success of software products. Earlier researches within this domain do not address API's usability via a component-based framework approach. The proposed framework emphasizes on consolidated formulation of various usability and quality models to derive chunks of dimensional variables. Further the paper highlights API usability practices and heuristics applied in API development process and discusses API product's artifacts component to be used in deriving further product-related components to support enhancing usability.