Paper "On the usability and use of API documentation" at the Usable Security and Privacy Workshop (MuC 2020)

The paper "Zur Benutzbarkeit und Verwendung von API-Dokumentationen" by Rolf Huesmann, Alexander Zeier, Andreas Heinemann and Alexander Wiesmaier was accepted at the Usable Security and Privacy Workshop of Mensch und Computer 2020. The workshop will take place virtually on 06.09.2020. Congratulations to them!

Abstract
Good documentation is essential for good usability of (security) APIs, i.e. in particular for the correct use of APIs. Requirements for a good documentation of APIs have been described in several papers, but so far there is no technical implementation (called documentation system in the following) that realises these requirements.

The requirements can be divided into requirements for the documentation system and requirements for the documentation content. From 13 identified requirements for a documentation system itself, 9 were implemented in a prototype as part of this work and evaluated in a user study with 22 test subjects using a cryptographic API.

It was shown that the implementation of the requirement Enable fast use of the API depends on the one hand significantly on the quality of the content entered, but on the other hand also subsumes 5 other of the requirements considered or their implementation. The two other implemented requirements (classic reference and queries and comments function) were hardly or not at all used by the test subjects. Their usefulness and relevance were to be analysed in a long-term study.