Category: API Docs in the lit.

I’m back at the blog, after a year, five months, and a couple of days. As my first blog post in a while, please be patient. It might be a bit rough.

How time flies. To catch up…

I’ve been working as technical writer since last January. Although I enjoyed working as an academic, it became clear that academia and I weren’t really cut out for each other. So, I’m back in the Pacific Northwest writing technical documentation for Amazon Web Services.

Returning to industry

It was almost as if I’d never left. I have to credit the amazing group of people I work with for making the transition a smooth one. Working in big tech is pretty much as I recall: lots to do, little time to do it—so, maybe not that different from academia.

While Amazon, in general, is famous for its short average tenure, on our team, the low average tenure is simply because we’ve been hiring new writers and we’re looking for more. We’ve got a lot of work to do! Good people, interesting work, decent pay…can’t complain, and did I mention that we’re hiring?

I’m finding the work interesting in all the dimensions that intrigue me: Technical novelty, information design, and collaboration with engineering.

The part of the product I work on has been around for a while and is still growing, so addressing the information needs of both new and experienced users presents some interesting challenges–made even more interesting by the short schedules. The collaborative group of engineers, designers, and writers I work with, however, make tackling these challenges both enjoyable and possible.

What’s new in the scholarly literature?

While catching up, I thought I’d see what’s new in the API documentation research. A quick (and by no means comprehensive) survey of the academic work that’s been published on API documentation since the list of New articles on API documentation I posted three years ago shows that software developers:

• Still want better docs with more code samples.
• Are still trying to create them with automation (instead of tech writers)
• Are still not citing work from actual technical communication research.
• Still don’t seem to do much research past surveys.

Sigh. Everything old, is new again.

I’ll organize this more later (and hopefully change some of these initial impressions for the better). In the meantime, I’m waiting for the research that explores Why is this still the case after over a decade of research pointing out the issues (repeatedly)? This 2018 paper by Murphy et al. is in the right direction by exploring some of the challenges that practitioners face trying to design usable APIs–a prerequisite for making it easier to create usable API documentation. Maybe there’s a research opportunity for a similar study with technical writers.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see all the research being published on API documentation. It’s much better than the comparative handful of articles that were available on the topic when I started researching it in 2008.

Murphy, L., Kery, M. B., Alliyu, O., Macvean, A., & Myers, B. A. (2018, October). API designers in the field: Design practices and challenges for creating usable APIs. In 2018 ieee symposium on visual languages and human-centric computing (vl/hcc) (pp. 249-258). IEEE.

As More docs on API docs described, it’s mostly academic authors writing about API docs, but only by a narrow margin. As I was reviewing the articles I found, my impression was that only men were writing about API documentation.

Because impressions can be mistaken, I went through the articles and reviewed all the authors to determine their gender, insofar as I could. Because this information is rarely reported with the articles, I had to do some digging.

Most of my determination of an author’s gender is based on the authors given name; however, where available, I used their portrait or other references to confirm. For the names that had a recognizable (to me) gender preference, I assigned them accordingly. For those I couldn’t easily tell, I searched for the author’s profile on Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and just plain-ole’ Google to find a social media page. However, after all that, I could not make a credible determination for a little over 5% of the authors so they show up as unknown in the pie chart.

It turns out that my bibliography of 112 articles has a total of 203 unique authors; at least 160 (79%) of which seem to be men, while at least 32 (16%) seem to be women. Or, seen another way,

1 author in 6 who has written an article on API documentation is a woman.

That ratio is roughly consistent with the population of software developers reported in surveys such as Women in Software Engineering: The Sobering Stats (1/6) and 2018 Women in Tech Report (1/7).

So, what does this say?

I’m not sure. It seems like a case of: hey, 1 in 6 authors of articles about API documentation is a woman, which is in the same proportion as the software development field. And, hey, only 1 in 6 authors is a woman, which is in the same proportion as the software development field.  Also noteworthy, the earliest article in my list was authored by a woman.

I’ve tabulated my entire collection of docs on API docs for your perusing pleasure in my API documentation bibliography. The documents for which I could find links to online copies have links. The rest have restricted access. Fortunately (and somewhat surprisingly) only 14 (12.5%) of the 112 articles I’ve found so far are restricted.

The articles are sorted by year published and title so the most recent publications will appear at the top. I’ll check in every once in a while to see what’s new in the field and update the list as necessary.

I’ve reviewed each of these to varying degrees of detail. Some are, admittedly, very detailed and read like a functional software specification (i.e. as dry as the Atacama), so in those, I read just enough to pull out the classification details.

I didn’t plan this (nor was I expecting it), but the author-affiliations of all these articles break down as:

• 47.3% of the articles were written by academic authors
• 42.0% of the articles were written by industry authors
• 8.9% of the articles were written by a mix (collaboration?) of industry and academic authors

Continue reading “More docs on API docs”

I’ve just collected some more articles for my bibliography of API documentation-related articles and the trend I saw earlier this year hasn’t changed much. In all fairness, eight months is probably not enough time to see a change given the pace of academic publishing. I now have 114 articles in my list of API documentation-related topics.

114!

Searching for API DOCUMENTATION produces a lot of hits on actual API documentation (good news: there’s a lot of API Documentation out there!) Searching for Writing API Documentation produces more articles relevant to what I’m looking for. I’ve also merged my academic and non-academic API documentation bibliographic data, so I can compare and contrast them together.

The merged lists have these characteristics:

114 articles! and I know I haven’t found them all, yet.

• 71% (81/114) of the articles are from CS-oriented sources
• 29% (33/114) are from TC-oriented sources
• 81% of the CS-oriented articles are from edited publications (books, journals)
• 27% of the TC-oriented articles are from edited pubs.
• 27% (31/114) of the API documentation articles were published in 2017

So, what does this mean?

Continue reading “More articles on API documentation”

These are some the new articles I found while browsing Google Scholar on the subject of API documentation since my last update on the topic. I found about 20-some new articles since January, which is exciting! Here’s a review of just the ones I’ve had a chance to skim and write up, so far.

This recent trove of documents makes me happy and sad as did the papers I reviewed in an earlier post. These articles contain lots of great research into API documentation, who uses it, and how it’s used. All of these are available for download and I would encourage you to do that if you are interested in API documentation.

At the same time, I’m still disappointed that there has been absolutely zero research published on the topic from the technical communication community this year (was I really the only one who was doing that lately?!) and little to no reference to anything tech-comm related in these papers. If you know of some API research published in a tech-comm venue (and that’s not already in my list), please let me know. At this point, all this is just a warning that some of my disappointment might seep through into my article reviews.

Many of these articles (3/4) had both academic and industry authors, which suggests that industry-academy partnerships aren’t that unusual in the research of API Documentation—if you’re in computer science. In tech comm, as Tom Johnson’s recent survey laments, not so much.

Some of these articles cite earlier research in developer user studies and also contribute to that body of work. None of them, however, cite what I would call writing or reading research. That wouldn’t be so troubling, if it were just these articles, but I can’t think of an article on the topic of API documentation published in a computer science venue that talks about actually reading and using the content. At the same time, there now seems to be a recognizable genre in API documentation literature that Head et al. describes as, “finding anti-patterns in documentation” (see reviews below).

So, here’s a short review of four of the articles I read this morning.

Continue reading “New articles on API documentation”

I added a couple of new resources to help the technical communication community. Here is the current list of lists.

1. Some of my favorite user experience books can be found at Selected readings on user experience design.
2. My list of API documentation articles -non academic has grown from 18 to 30 articles. Most new ones are from the past year, but I found a few earlier articles that I seemed to have missed in my last update.
3. My original list of academic (for the most part) papers contains the articles that I’ve cited in various papers.
4. A recent post contains some recent academic work about API documentation that I haven’t yet filed away in any of the preceding lists.

Plotting them over time shows some recent growth in frequency as with the academic articles on API documentation, however there are 66% more academic articles on the topic in my [ever expanding] collection, so it might still be too soon to draw and comparisons.

I’m still intrigued by my discovery from yesterday that I describe in API documentation research-Where’s Tech Comm? The idea seems like it might have some legs for some tenure-worthy academic paper(s), so I thought I’d dig into it a bit more to see what I might be signing myself up for.

And the plot thickened. Which, for an academic, is a good thing in that it means it has potential for papers, talks, and maybe even a book? (Yippee!). But, I’m getting ahead of myself. (No book tours, yet.).

Disclaimer: what follows is a peek into my notebook and represents a work-in-progress. Any claims I make (or appear to make) are subject to change as the research progresses.

I started to take the study a little more seriously and methodically–i.e., I started collecting data. For now, my working research questions evolved from, “Why are only computer science researchers studying API documentation and why don’t they refer to technical communication research much (or at all)?” to “Have computer science researchers ever heard of technical communication research?!” and vice versa.

Google Scholar is for Computer Science research

In searching for “API Documentation” on Google Scholar, I collected something like 50 articles and papers having to do with API documentation over the years (The earliest paper I’ve found, so far, is from 1996). The following figure shows the distribution of papers by year published.

It’s good to see the topic being researched (finally!). I started studying them around 2008-2009 when, as you can see in the chart, there weren’t many to use as a reference. As academic fields of study go, this is definitely a niche topic. And, yes the bars add up to more than 50-something because I’m still in the process of cleaning my data set. The numbers are going to be rough in the meantime, but they seem representative if they aren’t precise, yet.

The more I looked at the academic papers I was collecting, the trend of them being from computer science(y) journals and conferences was even more skewed as this chart shows.

From the look of that graph, you could think that TC is hardly talking about API documentation. It’s even more stark when you take into account that I wrote 5 of the 8 articles in the TC slice of the pie.

Yet, I hear lots of API documentation talk on TC social media channels and Linked in has several groups dedicated to the topic so something isn’t passing the sniff test.

Is TC research on API documentation only published in blogs

As a reality check, I went to regular Google and search on API documentation and found a whole bunch of relevant topics. I haven’t formally collected them into my list, so I can’t say how many, yet, but it was clearly being talked about on the web. From a quick skim, the articles from the general web seemed to be more TC oriented than CS oriented (but, don’t quote me, on that, yet).

What slowed my progress down, momentarily, was I wanted to study the scholarly articles they were using as their references. I think that’s where some tenure-worthy research opportunities will be found. I’m (slowly and tediously) categorizing the references cited by each of the scholarly articles to get an idea of what they’re basing their research on. While that’s going to be tedious (i.e. incredibly tedious: 50+ articles each with 30+ references = 1,500+ citations to clean up and organize–if only they just attached a metadata file).

Unfortunately, the blog posts and informal references from the TC community in “regular” Google don’t tend to list as many citations as the academic articles, so looking for their foundations is going to take some more detective work. But, one thing at a time.

What it’s looking like, however, is that the academic CS scholars don’t refer to much in the way of TC research. I suppose that if they don’t provide any citations, you could say that the TC research doesn’t either. Maybe I’ll need to turn to some tcmyths for more info?

In any case, regardless of where this goes, I’ll end up with a killer bibliography of API documentation!

Google Scholar was reading my mind this morning and provided me a list of recommended papers. This was both interesting and troubling at the same time. It was interesting that they knew what I’d find interesting (they have been listening!) and troubling that I was only familiar with a couple from the list (i.e. I need to read more, apparently). Most disturbing was that in the articles on API documentation, most all references that those articles cited were from computer science literature and not from documentation or technical writing. One article cited my dissertation, so I can’t say there were no references to documentation research.

It could be there’s nothing to find. Searching Google Scholar for articles on “API documentation” yields no articles from non computer-science journals until one of mine appears on the fourth page of search results. So, it’s a reasonable question to ask if there are other sources to find.

In any case, here’s what I’ve found, so far.

Articles reviewed (during my lunch break)

As I said, I only recognized one of the papers in the list, and I’ve not reviewed every single one, yet, so I’m still pulling this together.  Here are the articles that I’ve reviewed, so far.
Continue reading “API documentation research-Where’s Tech Comm?”

I published my first API around 1988 for a peripheral to the IBM PC in which the API consisted of software interrupts to MS-DOS. (A software interrupt is similar in function to a procedure call, but used for operating system and device driver functions. I didn’t write the documentation (at least not the published version), but a couple of co-workers and I wrote the interface.

Later, I want to say in 1997-ish, I wrote the API provided by the Performance Data Helper (PDH) dynamic link library (DLL) that shipped in Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 (IIRC). I didn’t write the documentation for this API either as I was still developing software at the time. A super technical writer did the heavy lifting of making sense out of the functions the PDH.DLL provided.

While this isn’t a particularly impressive resume of API development, it shows that APIs and I go way back. They are a very useful tool for solving many problems. Yet, over the past 30+ years that I’ve been using, developing, and documenting APIs, there hasn’t really been much written about their documentation–until recently.

In my informal count (i.e. what I could find on Google while having my morning coffee a few days ago). I came across 17 articles and blog posts on the topic in just the past seven years (full list at the end of the post).

For the curious, here is some of the research that supports what I’ve read in some of these articles. Continue reading “A brief history of API Docs”