Web API Usability: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract Context Web APIs play a key role in modern application development, and their usability is crucial for them to be of value. Aim: This systematic mapping study aims to identify and categorize metrics related to web API usability. Method We identified four research questions and a set of search terms related to these. We applied inclusion, exclusion, and quality criteria to filter out unrelated articles, and then performed data extraction on the remaining studies. Results We found a total of 96 metrics. Most of the usability metrics (40 %) were related to learnability. We also found that only one of the articles proposed metrics in the context of a usability model and that most of the studies obtained values for their metrics automatically. Conclusions Our findings highlight a lack of research in the field of web API usability + metrics, with only 14 % of the metrics we identified being explicitly related to web APIs.