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Current programming practices rely heavily on the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and frameworks. However, APIs can be challenging to learn and use. Existing research focuses on specific barriers programmers encounter while learning APIs, providing a fragmented understanding of the process. In this paper, we analyze the holistic process of twelve programmers learning the React JS API using sensemaking theory as a guiding framework for qualitative coding of behaviors. We describe how these API learners moved through sensemaking stages and how they interacted with information during each sensemaking stage. Our results highlighted programmers’ tendency to seek understanding when they encountered problems.
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Searching the State Space: A Qualitative Study of API Protocol Usability
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) often define protocols -- restrictions on the order of client calls to API methods. API protocols are common and difficult to use, which has generated tremendous research effort in alternative specification, implementation, and verification techniques. However, little is understood about the barriers programmers face when using these APIs, and therefore the research effort may be misdirected. To understand these barriers better, we perform a two-part qualitative study. First, we study developer forums to identify problems that developers have with protocols. Second, we perform a think-aloud observational study, in which we systematically observe professional programmers struggle with these same problems to get more detail on the nature of their struggles and how they use available resources. In our observations, programmer time was spent primarily on four types of searches of the protocol state space. These observations suggest protocol-targeted tools, languages, and verification techniques will be most effective if they enable programmers to efficiently perform state search.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1111750
- PAR ID:
- 10038376
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Program Comprehension
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 82 to 93
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2015.17
