Documenting APIs with examples: Lessons learned with the APIMiner platform

Abstract

Software development increasingly relies on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to increase productivity. However, learning how to use new APIs in many cases is a nontrivial task given their ever-increasing complexity. To help developers during the API learning process, we describe in this paper a platform - called APIMiner - that instruments the standard Java-based API documentation format with concrete examples of usage. The examples are extracted from a private source code repository - composed by real systems - and summarized using a static slicing algorithm. We also describe a particular instantiation of our platform for the Android API. To evaluate the proposed solution, we performed a field study, when professional Android developers used the platform by four months.