Constructing Usage Scenarios for API Redocumentation

Abstract

Software development relies heavily on reusable libraries and software components. For correct use of the provided API, proper documentation is needed. API usage is often demonstrated by giving example applications and code samples. In this paper we propose an approach for mining such usage scenarios from run-time communication between sample applications and the API. This is done automatically by first monitoring the API usage of sample applications, then filtering the generated traces, and finally synthesizing the sequence diagrams and illustrating them in a well-formed way as UML2 sequence diagrams. Such usage scenarios support the software engineer in comprehending the usage of the API. With proper tool support they can also be used for validating other applications' API usage and for generating code for a new application using the same API.