The concept maps method as a tool to evaluate the usability of APIs

Gerken, Jens; Jetter, Hans-Christian; Zöllner, Michael; Mader, Martin; Reiterer, Harald

doi:10.1145/1978942.1979445

Cited by 24 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 28 publications

(16 reference statements)

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“…Looking at the choice of an API from the developers' side, de Souza and Bentolila (2009) presented an approach that allows developers to evaluate API usability based on complexity metrics. Finally, learning theories have also been used in the usability evaluation of APIs (Gerken et al 2011). Taking into account API usability problems reported in the above studies, we tried to identify application crash causes that could be related to poor API usability.…”

Section: Usabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Charting the API minefield using software telemetry data

2014

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Programs draw significant parts of their functionality through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Apart from the way developers incorporate APIs in their software, the stability of these programs depends on the design and implementation of the APIs. In this work, we report how we used software telemetry data to analyze the causes of API failures in Android applications. Specifically, we got 4.9 GB worth of crash data that thousands of applications sent to a centralized crash report management service. We processed that data to extract approximately a million stack traces, stitching together parts of chained exceptions, and established heuristic rules to draw the border between applications and the API calls. We examined a set of more than a half million stack traces associated with risky API calls to map the space of the most common application failure reasons. Our findings show that the top ones can be attributed to memory exhaustion, race conditions or deadlocks, and missing or corrupt resources. Given the classes of the crash causes we identified, we recommend API design and implementation choices, such as specific exceptions, default resources, and non-blocking algorithms, that can eliminate common failures. In addition, we argue that development tools like memory analyzers, thread debuggers, and static analyzers can prevent crashes through early code testing and analysis. Finally, some execution platform and framework designs for process and memory management can also eliminate some application crashes.

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Section: Usabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Charting the API minefield using software telemetry data

2014

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“…The importance of a well designed API cannot be overestimated as "this can have a tremendous impact on the final product as well as the efficiency of the development process" [3]. Connichiwa wants to hide implementation details and provide high-level functions to quickly achieve common tasks ("low threshold" [9]) and at the same time be flexible enough to implement complex applications ("high ceiling" [9]).…”

Section: Usability Of Apimentioning

confidence: 99%

Connichiwa

Schreiner

Rädle

Jetter

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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While Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing is getting closer to reality, a fundamental part of it -the interconnection of devices into a "ubiquitous network" -is not achieved yet. Differences in hardware, architecture, and missing standardizations are just some reasons for this. We think that existing research is not versatile enough and too tailored to either single applications, hardware, or location. We contribute Connichiwa -a versatile framework for creating web applications across multiple devices. We base Connichiwa on four key goals: integration of existing devices, independence of network infrastructure, versatility of application scenario, and usability of its API. Connichiwa runs web applications on off-the-shelf consumer devices. With no external dependencies, such as a server, it enables a great variety of possible scenarios. We tested the technical feasibility of Connichiwa in seven example applications and plan to evaluate the framework and the usability of its API in a one-week Hackathon.

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“…When developing a small application can take even weeks, fitting valid evaluation tasks into an observation session lasting typically 1-2 hours is difficult [8]. The recently introduced peer review [9] and the concept maps [8] methods address this problem by involving real world usage of an API over a long period of time. However, they are still considerably laborious and yield only qualitative findings.…”

Section: Related Work On Api Complexity Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparative API complexity analysis of two platforms for networked multiplayer games using a reference game

Alatalo¹,

Kuusela²,

Puuperä³

et al. 2013

2013 3rd International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering: Engineering Computer Games to Enable Positive, Progressive C

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Abstract-In this paper we propose the quantitative analysis of the complexity of a simple reference game implemented on a particular gaming platform as means for characterizing how the platform succeeds in easing the development of networked multiplayer games. We first present our own open source tool based on Sneed's Object-Point (OP) method for the automatic quantitative assessment of the complexity of a software API by analyzing a source code using the API. We then apply our tool, together with the recently released JSComplexity tool based on classical software complexity metrics, to compare two platforms for networked multiplayer games, the open source realXtend Tundra SDK and the proprietary Union. As the reference games we use existing implementations of the simple Pong game atop the two platforms. Our data shows that these complexity metrics reveal API design tradeoffs, resulting in complexity differences in the reference games.

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The concept maps method as a tool to evaluate the usability of APIs

Cited by 24 publications

References 28 publications

Charting the API minefield using software telemetry data

Charting the API minefield using software telemetry data

Connichiwa

Comparative API complexity analysis of two platforms for networked multiplayer games using a reference game

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