Modeling support for strategic API planning and analysis

Abstract

APIs provide value beyond technical functionality. They enable and manage access to strategic business assets and play a key role in enabling software ecosystems. Existing work has begun to consider the strategic business value of software APIs, but such work has limited analysis capabilities and has not made use of established, structured modeling techniques from software and requirements engineering. Such modeling languages have been used for strategic analysis of ecosystems and value exchange. We believe these techniques expand analysis possibilities for APIs, and we apply them as part of a cross-company case study focused on strategic API planning and analysis. Results show that goal, value, and workflow modeling provide new, API-specific benefits that include mapping the API ecosystem, facilitating incremental API planning, understanding dynamic API-specific roles, identifying bottlenecks in API change workflows, and identifying API value.