Effective Java programming language guide
Effective Java programming language guide
Usability Engineering
The relevance of software documentation, tools and technologies: a survey
Proceedings of the 2002 ACM symposium on Document engineering
Six Learning Barriers in End-User Programming Systems
VLHCC '04 Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages - Human Centric Computing
Usability Implications of Requiring Parameters in Objects' Constructors
ICSE '07 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering
The Factory Pattern in API Design: A Usability Evaluation
ICSE '07 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering
Usability evaluation for enterprise SOA APIs
Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Systems development in SOA environments
The implications of method placement on API learnability
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering
A case study of API redesign for improved usability
VLHCC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Usability challenges for enterprise service-oriented architecture APIs
VLHCC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
A Quality Model for Mashup Components
ICWE '9 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Engineering
Quality-based recommendations for mashup composition
ICWE'10 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Current trends in web engineering
A field study of API learning obstacles
Empirical Software Engineering
Methods towards API usability: a structural analysis of usability problem categories
HCSE'12 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering
Form-Based Web Service Composition for Domain Experts
ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)
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All software today is written using libraries, toolkits, frameworks and other application programming interfaces (APIs). We performed a user study of the online documentation a large and complex API for Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (eSOA), which identified many issues and recommendations for making API documentation easier to use. eSOA is an appropriate testbed because the target user groups range from high-level business experts who do not have significant programming expertise (and thus are end-participant developers), to professional programmers. Our study showed that the participants' background influenced how they navigated the documentation. Lack of familiarity with business terminology was a barrier we observed for developers without business application experience. Participants with business software experience had difficulty differentiating similarly named services. Both groups avoided areas of the documentation that had an inconsistent visual design. A new design for the documentation that supports flexible navigation strategies seem to be required to support the wide range of users for eSOA. This paper summarizes our study and provides recommendations for future documentation for developers.