Demystify official API usage directives with crowdsourced API misuse scenarios, erroneous code examples and patches

Abstract

API usage directives in official API documentation describe the contracts, constraints and guidelines for using APIs in natural language. Through the investigation of API misuse scenarios on Stack Overflow, we identify three barriers that hinder the understanding of the API usage directives, i.e., lack of specific usage context, indirect relationships to cooperative APIs, and confusing APIs with subtle differences. To overcome these barriers, we develop a text mining approach to discover the crowdsourced API misuse scenarios on Stack Overflow and extract from these scenarios erroneous code examples and patches, as well as related API and confusing APIs to construct demystification reports to help developers understand the official API usage directives described in natural language. We apply our approach to API usage directives in official Android API documentation and android-tagged discussion threads on Stack Overflow. We extract 159,116 API misuse scenarios for 23,969 API usage directives of 3138 classes and 7471 methods, from which we generate the demystification reports. Our manual examination confirms that the extracted information in the generated demystification reports are of high accuracy. By a user study of 14 developers on 8 API-misuse related error scenarios, we show that our demystification reports help developer understand and debug API-misuse related program errors faster and more accurately, compared with reading only plain API usage-directive sentences.