Facing up to the inequality of crowdsourced API documentation

Abstract

API usability is a crucial issue in software development. One bottleneck of API usability is insufficient documentation. This study empirically confirmed the inequality of crowdsourced API documentation, which is one of the main sources of API documentation. To manage the inequality, a method for documentation reuse is proposed based on the nature of object-oriented programming language, inheritance. A case study was conducted in Stackoverflow, which is a widely used Q&A site, to study the feasibility of the documentation reuse. Results of the case study indicate that documentation reuse is feasible in improving both the coverage and quality of crowdsourced API documentations.