Usability Engineering
What programmers really want: results of a needs assessment for SDK documentation
Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Toward an understanding of the motivation Open Source Software developers
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering
What users say they want in documentation
SIGDOC '06 Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
An empirical analysis of open source software developers' motivations and continuance intentions
Information and Management
Working for Free? Motivations for Participating in Open-Source Projects
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
What Makes APIs Hard to Learn? Answers from Developers
IEEE Software
A field study of API learning obstacles
Empirical Software Engineering
An approach for evaluating FOSS projects for student participation
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
Development and application of a heuristic to assess trends in API documentation
Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication
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Studies of what software developers need from API documentation have reported consistent findings over the years; however, these studies all used similar methods--usually a form of observation or survey. Our study looks at API documentation as artifacts of the open-source software communities who produce them to study how documentation produced by the communities who use the software compares to past studies of what software developers want and need from API documentation. We reviewed API documentation from 33 of the most popular open-source software projects, assessed their documentation elements, and evaluated the quality of their visual design and writing. We found that the documentation we studied included most or all the documentation elements reported as desirable in earlier studies and in the process, we found that the design and writing quality of many documentation sets received considerable attention. Our findings reinforce the API requirements identified in the literature and suggest that the design and writing quality of the documentation are also critical API documentation requirements that warrant further study.