Open Stack

Hi all,
I just found this article about how developers use API documentation. What
I found is the authors of the article used a Google Chrome extension called
DocSight to get the insights they did. I wonder if we could request that
OpenStack REST API consumers use this extension? It would offer valuable
insight. Do you think people would be willing to run this and give us the
data?

Link to full article below this snippet:

The YouTube API recently moved their official developers support from
Google Groups to Stack Overflow
(Move<https://rackermail.rackspace.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=1nE3DNGFY0-6bZ9UxmIqE46y_Boy-M8IxdsJLUf3XFmcqGh3kyFh0NEXOvXh9jixiKByp9lzFdE.&URL=http%3a%2f%2fapiblog.youtube.com%2f2012%2f09%2fthe-youtube-api-on-stack-overflow.html>)—
relying on a few thousand questions about the API and on mechanisms of
Stack Overflow. And there is no sign in sight that documentation is all the
sudden going to get better. Developers revolt

Instead, developers have been indirectly documenting APIs themselves
through a process called crowd
documentation<https://rackermail.rackspace.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=1nE3DNGFY0-6bZ9UxmIqE46y_Boy-M8IxdsJLUf3XFmcqGh3kyFh0NEXOvXh9jixiKByp9lzFdE.&URL=http%3a%2f%2fblog.ninlabs.com%2f2012%2f05%2fcrowd-documentation%2f>,
by publishing blog posts and curating questions and answers about APIs. We
previously found that even without any inherent coordination, a crowd of
Android developers can cover as much as 88% of the API classes in
discussions on Stack Overflow.

We collected 1,316 days of Android developer history (average 11 weeks per
developer) and we found 9,234 visits to
stackoverflow<https://rackermail.rackspace.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=1nE3DNGFY0-6bZ9UxmIqE46y_Boy-M8IxdsJLUf3XFmcqGh3kyFh0NEXOvXh9jixiKByp9lzFdE.&URL=http%3a%2f%2fstackoverflow.com>,
as well as 2,547 to
developer.android.com<https://rackermail.rackspace.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=1nE3DNGFY0-6bZ9UxmIqE46y_Boy-M8IxdsJLUf3XFmcqGh3kyFh0NEXOvXh9jixiKByp9lzFdE.&URL=http%3a%2f%2fdeveloper.android.com>,
which hosts the official documentation for Android. We also analyzed the
code examples that could be found in the Stack Overflow data dump and
developer.android.com/guide<https://rackermail.rackspace.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=1nE3DNGFY0-6bZ9UxmIqE46y_Boy-M8IxdsJLUf3XFmcqGh3kyFh0NEXOvXh9jixiKByp9lzFdE.&URL=http%3a%2f%2fdeveloper.android.com%2fguide>
.
In our new study, we find that:

   - Developers may be getting as much as 50% of their documentation from
   Stack Overflow.
   - More examples can be found on Stack Overflow than the official
   documentation guide.
   - In web searches, Stack Overflow questions are visited 2x-10x more
   often than official documentation.

We also found some interesting patterns of web browsing behavior:

   - Developers directly browse official documentation in intermittent
   bursts.
   - Some developers learn APIs through “apprenticeships” with expert Stack
   Overflow users.
   - Developers continously reference Stack Overflow questions during
   development via search.


http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/03/api-documentation/<https://rackermail.rackspace.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=1nE3DNGFY0-6bZ9UxmIqE46y_Boy-M8IxdsJLUf3XFmcqGh3kyFh0NEXOvXh9jixiKByp9lzFdE.&URL=http%3a%2f%2fblog.ninlabs.com%2f2013%2f03%2fapi-documentation%2f>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/user-committee/attachments/20130319/49e390a3/attachment.html>