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API Usability at Scale

Luke Church
Craig Citro
Proceedings of the 26th annual workshop of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (2016)
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Abstract

Designing and maintaining useful and usable APIs remains challenging. At Google we manage hundreds of APIs. In this article we report on the experience of doing so and describe six on-going challenges: resource allocation, empirically-grounded guidelines, communicating issues, supporting API evolution over time, usable auth, and usable client libraries at scale.