TY - GEN
T1 - An Empirical Study on the Reliability of the Web API Document
AU - Hosono, Masaki
AU - Washizaki, Hironori
AU - Fukazawa, Yoshiaki
AU - Honda, Kiyoshi
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.
PY - 2018/7/2
Y1 - 2018/7/2
N2 - The importance of APIs in software development, especially web APIs, has increased Developers read documentation, which is available on the internet, and use the corresponding APIs in their products. However, documentation occasionally contains mistakes. Such mistakes can confuse developers or lead to defects that lower the quality of the product. In this paper, we investigate the reliability of web APIs by extracting and comparing OpenAPI specifications from both the documentations and the results of the API calls. Almost half of the documentations are somehow unreliable. Mismatches between documentation and the response can be categorized into four types: 1) Undocumented Keys, 2) Dynamic Keys, 3) Unreturned Keys, and 4) Type Mismatched. This study will help developers design more reliable products.
AB - The importance of APIs in software development, especially web APIs, has increased Developers read documentation, which is available on the internet, and use the corresponding APIs in their products. However, documentation occasionally contains mistakes. Such mistakes can confuse developers or lead to defects that lower the quality of the product. In this paper, we investigate the reliability of web APIs by extracting and comparing OpenAPI specifications from both the documentations and the results of the API calls. Almost half of the documentations are somehow unreliable. Mismatches between documentation and the response can be categorized into four types: 1) Undocumented Keys, 2) Dynamic Keys, 3) Unreturned Keys, and 4) Type Mismatched. This study will help developers design more reliable products.
KW - API documentation
KW - REST API
KW - Web API
KW - documentation evolution
KW - microservices
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85066784099&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85066784099&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/APSEC.2018.00103
DO - 10.1109/APSEC.2018.00103
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85066784099
T3 - Proceedings - Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC
SP - 715
EP - 716
BT - Proceedings - 25th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC 2018
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 25th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC 2018
Y2 - 4 December 2018 through 7 December 2018
ER -