Paper Info
Title
A Quality Model and Its Quantitative Evaluation Method for Web APIs
Abstract
As Representational State Transfer (REST)-based Web APIs are spreading to enterprise information systems, software development for the use and provision of Web APIs is rapidly increasing. The quality of the Web APIs significantly influences the application quality and development productivity. However, no quality model for Web APIs has been established yet, because Web APIs differ from conventional APIs in that they execute remotely on different servers and may be changed independently of their users. These unique characteristics introduce new problems in the software engineering of Web APIs, and impose risks to the users, especially those using enterprise Web APIs, whose numbers are increasing. To solve these problems, in this paper, we propose a quality model for Web APIs that reflects their unique characteristics. As the main characteristics of this quality model, we propose the concept of Web API learnability to use and stability to change, from the perspective of Web API users. Based on this quality model, we also propose a set of measures and a quantitative evaluation method. In this study, we applied the proposed quality model and evaluation method to four types of actual Web APIs, including Uber, WordPress, OpenStack, and Media Processing. To validate the proposed model, we also conducted an empirical study of the usability of the Web APIs. Our comparison of the proposed quality statistics with those from the empirical study validates the effectiveness of the proposed quality model and its associated measures of the learnability and stability of Web APIs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/APSEC.2018.00075
2018 25th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Usability,Information systems,Productivity,Stakeholders,Stability analysis,ISO Standards
Web API,Systems engineering,Software engineering,Computer science
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1530-1362
978-1-7281-1970-0
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rieko Yamamoto1436.97
Kyoko Ohashi2133.24
Masahiro Fukuyori300.68
Kosaku Kimura482.75
Atsuji Sekiguchi5133.44
Ryuichi Umekawa600.34
Tadahiro Uehara71159.66
Mikio Aoyama830853.75