What should developers be aware of? : an empirical study on the directives of API documentation
Martin Monperrus, Michael Eichberg, Tekes, Elif, Mira Mezini · 2012
Application Programming Interfaces (API) are exposed to developers in order to reuse soft-ware libraries. API directives are natural-language statements in API documentation that make developers aware of constraints and guidelines related to the usage of an API. This paper presents the design and the results of an empirical study on the directives of API documen-tation of object-oriented libraries. Its main contribution is to propose and extensively discuss a taxonomy of 23 kinds of API directives. 1