TY - GEN
T1 - What do client developers concern when using web APIs? An empirical study on developer forums and stack overflow
AU - Venkatesh, Pradeep K.
AU - Wang, Shaohua
AU - Zhang, Feng
AU - Zou, Ying
AU - Hassan, Ahmed E.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.
PY - 2016/8/31
Y1 - 2016/8/31
N2 - Popularity of service-oriented computing makes more and more companies and organizations provide their services through Web Application Program Interfaces (Web APIs). The Web APIs are considered to offer a convenient way to integrate web services to client applications. However, the integration process is often challenging. For example, updated Web APIs may be no longer compatible with the current version of client applications, thus break the client applications. To help the integration process, it is of significant interest to understand the challenges that are encountered by client developers. Developer forums and Stack Overflow are commonly used by client developers to seek help from fellow peers. In this paper, we mine both developer forums and Stack Overflow to find the common challenges encountered by client developers. We perform an empirical study on 32 Web APIs with a total of 92,471 discussions. To extract topics from all discussions, we apply a topic modeling technique called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The results show that on average five dominant topics can cover at least 50% of questions regarding each Web API. We further investigate how topics evolve across Web APIs, and find five patterns. As a summary, our findings highlight a list of dominant concerns and persistent concerns for each Web API that Web API providers should pay more attention to.
AB - Popularity of service-oriented computing makes more and more companies and organizations provide their services through Web Application Program Interfaces (Web APIs). The Web APIs are considered to offer a convenient way to integrate web services to client applications. However, the integration process is often challenging. For example, updated Web APIs may be no longer compatible with the current version of client applications, thus break the client applications. To help the integration process, it is of significant interest to understand the challenges that are encountered by client developers. Developer forums and Stack Overflow are commonly used by client developers to seek help from fellow peers. In this paper, we mine both developer forums and Stack Overflow to find the common challenges encountered by client developers. We perform an empirical study on 32 Web APIs with a total of 92,471 discussions. To extract topics from all discussions, we apply a topic modeling technique called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The results show that on average five dominant topics can cover at least 50% of questions regarding each Web API. We further investigate how topics evolve across Web APIs, and find five patterns. As a summary, our findings highlight a list of dominant concerns and persistent concerns for each Web API that Web API providers should pay more attention to.
KW - Client developer discussions
KW - Crowd-sourced forum
KW - Developer forum
KW - Stack overflow
KW - Topic modeling
KW - Web API
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84990925138&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84990925138&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICWS.2016.25
DO - 10.1109/ICWS.2016.25
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84990925138
T3 - Proceedings - 2016 IEEE International Conference on Web Services, ICWS 2016
SP - 131
EP - 138
BT - Proceedings - 2016 IEEE International Conference on Web Services, ICWS 2016
A2 - Reiff-Marganiec, Stephan
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 23rd IEEE International Conference on Web Services, ICWS 2016
Y2 - 27 June 2016 through 2 July 2016
ER -