Developers Often Use Self-Directed Learning To Put APIs To Work
Developers Often Use Self-Directed Learning To Put APIs To Work
They focus on the parts they believe are relevant to the problem they are attempting to resolve
Software developers are self-directed learners
It’s common for software developers to adopt a self-directed approach to learning new APIs. Research from Sillito and Begel (2013) shows that some developers do not attempt to learn the entire API. Still, instead, they focus on the parts they believe are relevant to the problem they are attempting to resolve, for instance, getting a particular API function to work.
Developers often use this same approach to identify workarounds when problems occur.
Sillito and Begel found that “the features of applications that developers want to build define the topics they need to learn and that many of these topics are unknown to the developers until they encounter issues with them as they learn to build their application.”
Devs seek information from sources other than the official API documentation
”The conscious goal of their learning was often only to learn as much as was needed to complete their immediate development goal. They could return to the topic later to gain a deeper understanding if and when it was needed. Subjects typically found learning resources online via web search. They were more often supported by the experiences and wisdom of development community members from their blog posts and answers in Q&A forums than by the platform owner’s official documentation.”
