API Topic Issues Indexing, Exploration and Discovery for API Community Knowledge

Abstract

Application Programming Interface (API) is a core technology that facilitates developers' productivity by enabling the reuse of software components. Understanding APIs and gaining knowledge about their usage are therefore fundamental needs for developers that impact a wide range of software development activities. This paper presents an approach to enable API users to explore, discover and learn about APIs through API topic issues discussed in Stack Overflow (SO), a widely used programming, community question-answering (CQA) site. Our work proposes an integrated API Knowledge Base (KB) and indexing technique that combines both SO API-related posts as well as other API learning resources collected from the Web (e.g., API video-tutorials from Youtube). The resulting indexed and enriched API community knowledge can be queried in a API-topic-issue driven manner using a simple yet powerful domain-specific language (DSL). We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through Scout-bot, our tool for exploration and discovery of API topic issues.