Extracting examples for API usage patterns

Abstract

Recent empirical studies show that the lack of usage examples is a major obstacle for using modern APIs. This master dissertation presents an extension of the APIMiner platform--called APIMiner 2.0--that supports the instrumentation of traditional API documents with source code examples on methods that are frequently called together. The provided examples are summarized using a slicing algorithm that considers several strategies recently proposed in the literature to increase readability. An instance of the APIMiner 2.0 platform was implemented for the Android API. Furthermore, the dissertation presents an in-depth analysis on the use of the Android API by hundreds of client systems, a field study involving the use of APIMiner 2.0 by professional developers, and a controlled study with 29 subjects.