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Why do they ask? An exploratory study of crowd discussions about Android application programming interface in stack overflow

在 Stack Overflow 平台上关于安卓应用程序接口群体讨论的探索性研究

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Abstract

Nowadays, more and more Android developers prefer to seek help from Q&A website like Stack Overflow, despite the rich official documentation. Several researches have studied the limitations of the official application programming interface (API) documentations and proposed approaches to improve them. However, few of them digged into the requirements of the third-party developers to study this. In this work, we gain insight into this question from multidimensional perspectives of API developers and API users by a kind of cross-validation. We propose a hybrid approach, which combines manual inspection on artifacts and online survey on corresponding developers, to explore the different focus between these two types of stakeholders. In our work, we manually inspect 1000 posts and receive 319 questionnaires in total. Through the mutual verification of the inspection and survey process, we found that the users are more concerned with the usage of API, while the official documentation mainly provides functional description. Furthermore, we identified 9 flaws of the official documentation and summarized 12 aspects (from the content to the representation) for promotion to improve the official API documentations.

摘要

如今尽管安卓的官方文档内容越来越丰富, 但是越来愈多的安卓开发人员更愿意在 Stack Overflow 等问答社区中寻求帮助, 而不是在安卓官方文档中寻找答案。对此, 一些研究者对官方文档 的局限性进行研究, 并提出改进方法, 但是他们很少有从第三方开发者的需求角度对这个问题进行研 究。本文采用一种交叉验证的方法从 API(应用程序接口)文档维护人员和第三方用户的多维视角研究 这个问题, 提出了一种结合人工检测和调查问卷的混合方法来探索不同利益相关者关注点的不同。在 人工检测过程中我们对 1000 个 Stack Overflow 中的帖子进行分析;在线调查问卷过程中共收到了319 份问卷结果。通过人工检测和调查问卷的相互验证, 我们发现第三方用户更关心如何使用API, 但是 官方文档更多的对 API 的功能进行描述, 缺少如何使用API 的示例。此外, 我们发现了官方文档的9 个缺陷, 并列举了 12 个可以提高API 文档的方式。

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, College of Computer Changsha, Changsha, 410073, China

    Qiang Fan  (范强), Tao Wang  (王涛), Cheng Yang  (杨程), Gang Yin  (尹刚), Yue Yu  (余跃) & Huai-min Wang  (王怀民)

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  1. Qiang Fan  (范强)
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  2. Tao Wang  (王涛)
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  5. Yue Yu  (余跃)
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  6. Huai-min Wang  (王怀民)
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Correspondence to Tao Wang  (王涛).

Additional information

Foundation item: Project(2018-YFB1004202) supported by the National Key R&D Program of China; Project(61702534) supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China

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Fan, Q., Wang, T., Yang, C. et al. Why do they ask? An exploratory study of crowd discussions about Android application programming interface in stack overflow. J. Cent. South Univ. 26, 2432–2446 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11771-019-4185-5

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