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

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.