API Topics Issues in Stack Overflow Q&As Posts: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have become one of the key assets within modern businesses, facilitating the linking and integration of intra- and inter-organizational data and systems in the context of complex and heterogeneous technology ecosystems. APIs allow organizations to monetize data, build profitable partnerships and foster innovation and growth. Understanding APIs and their usage are therefore key to building solutions for enabling successful business operations. This paper aims at understanding API topic issues posted on Stack Overflow (SO), a Community Question Answering (CQA) site for programmers. We conduct an empirical analysis on a sample of 400 randomly-selected Q&As threads to help identify API-related issues and their main topics. A thematic analysis performed on this sample reveals eight main topics related to APIs, among which API usage, debugging, API constraints and API security emerged as the major ones. We also exemplify the types of support provided by SO community in addressing each of the identified topics and discuss possible venues on how to further leverage this knowledge.