SAP ACADEMIC RESEARCH CONFERENCE August 21, 2009

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1 SAP ACADEMIC RESEARCH CONFERENCE August 21, 2009

2 API Usability for Enterprise Services Jeffrey Stylos, Brad A. Myers, Andrew Faulring, Jack Beaton, Sae Young ( Sophie ) Jeong, Yingyu ( Clare ) Xie School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Collaborators at SAP: Ralf Ehret, Jan Karstens, Daniela Busse, Arkin Efeoglu, Oliver Schmidt, Claudius Fischer, Christina Hall, Anke Riechers, Gunther Stuhec, Bernhard Drittler, Sven Krueppel-Berndt, Andreas Bold, Bernd Schmidt, Heinz Roggenkemper, and Paul Hofmann 2

3 Human Side of Programming How to make programming easier by focusing on the human aspects of programming Human-centered design process: Perform studies to inform design Provide new knowledge about what people do and think Create innovative tools and designs based on the data Evaluate results

4 APIs are the Human Interface to Functionality API usability affects experts Productivity Quality of code Less frustration API usability affects adoption Previous studies have shown improvements by factors of 2 to 11 times faster by using humancentered design process Time (min) Time to Find a Method Methods on Expected Objects Methods on Helper Objects 0 Task Web Task Thingies Task 4

5 Studies of Enterprise Services APIs Sponsored by SAP Study APIs for Enterprise Services (Web Services) Client-server architecture organized into services using XML to communicate High complexity Requires significant flexibility and customizability XML Server Services Client WSDL XML Stub Code

6 Lab study Programming Study 6 programmer participants, each had 2 hours Visual Studio.NET Partially written C# code Participants given documentation, architecture diagrams, service testing framework Product String Find Product Product ID Customer String Find Customer Customer ID Create Sales Order Sales Order ID Supplier String Find Supplier Supplier ID 6

7 Programming Study Results Parameters with complex hierarchical structures Inconsistency between structures across services Custome r Customer Name Customer Common Information Complex, undocumented control parameters Documentation, no code examples Customer First Line Name Customer Address Information

frequently missed CustomerAddressBasicDataByNameAndAddressRequestMessageCustomerSelectionCommonName

8 Programming Study Results Stub generators that connect code to XML introduce complexities No sample code since multiple targets Naming problems: Too long Not understandable Differences in middle are frequently missed CustomerAddressBasicDataByNameAndAddressRequestMessageCustomerSelectionCommonName CustomerAddressBasicDataByNameAndAddressResponseMessageCustomerSelectionCommonName Brad A. Myers, CMU

9 Study of SAP s API Documentation 9 participants: 5 with business application background Task: need create a sales order service, given string names for the buyer, seller, and product Needs 3 helper services to find IDs Structure of the ES Workplace documentation 9

Business background helped Success at Finding Items Number of Participants 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 Process

10 Documentation Results Multiple paths: unclear which one to use Some paths were dead ends Inconsistent look and feel caused immediate abandonment of paths Hard to find required info. Business background helped Success at Finding Items Number of Participants Process Component Service Interface Service operation Finding interrelated services Non-Business background Business background Brad A. Myers, CMU

11 Jadeite Documentation Tool Jadeite: Java API Documentation with Extra Information Tacked-on for Emphasis Ideas for improving API documentation inspired by our studies Focus attention on most popular packages and classes using font size Placeholders for methods that users want to exist Automatically extracted code examples for way to create classes and related classes Improved performance by factor of 3

12 Jadeite Documentation Tool

13 Apatite Documentation Tool Apatite: Associative Perusing of APIs That Identifies Targets Easily Motivated by our documentation study Start with verbs (actions) and properties and find what classes implement them Find things associated with other things E.g., classes that are often used together Classes that implement or are used by a method

14 Apatite Documentation Tool

15 Current Collaboration Simple Samples documentation Next step: Work on new platform adaption layer models Goal: Help make underlying models that better match users mental models

16 API Usability for Enterprise Services Jeffrey Stylos, Brad A. Myers, Andrew Faulring, Jack Beaton, Sae Young ( Sophie ) Jeong, Yingyu ( Clare ) Xie Funded by: 16

18 SAP ACADEMIC RESEARCH CONFERENCE August 21, 2009

through Human-Centered Approaches

Improving Software Development through Human-Centered Approaches 1 Brad A. Myers Human-Computer Interaction Institute School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam bam@cs.cmu.educmu