An empirical study on evolution of API documentation

  • Authors:

  • Lin Shi;Hao Zhong;Tao Xie;Mingshu Li

  • Affiliations:

  • Laboratory for Internet Software Technologies, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;Laboratory for Internet Software Technologies, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University;Laboratory for Internet Software Technologies, Institute of Software and Key Laboratory for Computer Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • FASE'11/ETAPS'11 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Fundamental approaches to software engineering: part of the joint European conferences on theory and practice of software
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

With the evolution of an API library, its documentation also evolves. The evolution of API documentation is common knowledge for programmers and library developers, but not in a quantitative form. Without such quantitative knowledge, programmers may neglect important revisions of API documentation, and library developers may not effectively improve API documentation based on its revision histories. There is a strong need to conduct a quantitative study on API documentation evolution. However, as API documentation is large in size and revisions can be complicated, it is quite challenging to conduct such a study. In this paper, we present an analysis methodology to analyze the evolution of API documentation. Based on the methodology, we conduct a quantitative study on API documentation evolution of five widely used real-world libraries. The results reveal various valuable findings, and these findings allow programmers and library developers to better understand API documentation evolution.