Developer experience · Systematic literature review and classification of publications by API maintenance, usability and other themes.
A Systematic Review of API Evolution Literature
Peer-reviewed research · 2021
Summary
API evolution research spans usability, misuse, maintenance, migration, documentation and recommendation; developers face breaking-change and adoption challenges.
For your marketing
Possible founder application
Treat compatibility, migration and documentation as product features; instrument breaking changes and communicate deprecations with ecosystem evidence.
Reported result
What the study found
API evolution research spans usability, misuse, maintenance, migration, documentation and recommendation; developers face breaking-change and adoption challenges.
Research question
What the authors investigated
What is the state of research on API evolution, its challenges, topics, tools and evaluations?
Design
Systematic literature review and classification of publications by API maintenance, usability and other themes.
Sample and setting
369 publications (1994–2020); primary studies include empirical, data-mining and case studies of software APIs/ecosystems.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The authors identify threats to validity including search coverage, classification judgment and publication bias.
Research sources
Authoritative publisher/repository page fetched in this run; abstract, bibliographic metadata, methods/results and limitations on the cited page support this synthesis (https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3470133). Firecrawl research job 01a14366-d263-71d0-bc44-b95482987b7b returned this citation and metadata.