ninlabs research

We collected 1,316 days of Android developer history (average 11 weeks per developer) and we found 9,234 visits to stackoverflow, as well as 2,547 to developer.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.

But it is only so long before interruption finds a way to pierce my protective bubble. Like you, I am programmer, interrupted. Unfortunately, our understanding of interruption and remedies for them are not too far from homeopathic cures and bloodletting leeches.

Traditional documentation requires a process where a few people write for many potential users (especially in the case of API documentation). The resulting documentation, more often than not just doesn’t cut it — There aren’t enough examples, details, or explanations.

Following a successful collaboration with Emerson Murphy-Hill on “How We Refactor, and How We Know It”, we decided on doing another empirical study, this time on Java generics. Turns out Christian Bird had similar interests, so we banded together for a new paper recently accepted for MSR’11.

Developers search the web for many questions they have about using apis. Developers can also use social media sites such as codesnipr, stackoverflow, refactormycode, or blog sites such as this one to provide answers or share knowledge about using apis. For example, this blog gets many hits each week from people looking on how to do programmatic search with the automation api in Visual Studio.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”