Usability evaluation of configuration-based API design concepts

Abstract

Usability is an important quality attribute for designing APIs, but usability-related decision factors are often unknown. This is also the case when looking at APIs for configuration tasks, like for dependency injection or object-relational mapping. In these areas three different API design concepts can be found, which are annotations, fluent interfaces, and XML. There exists no research concerning usability-related characteristics and differences between these concepts. In this paper, we present a usability study that identifies such characteristics and differences between the three concepts, by comparing three different variants of an API for dependency injection. From the study results we evaluate advantages and disadvantages in different use cases, and show how to build more usable configuration-based APIs. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.