Abstract

The number of publicly offered Web APIs has increased continuously over the last decade (Santos 2017) since successful public Web API initiatives provide a new source of profitability for organizations. Nevertheless, such initiatives are only successful, if the functionality or data offered is actually demanded by third-party developers and the API design meets developers’ expectations. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, there are currently no processes or tools enabling the direct influence of API consumers on the design of public Web APIs. Therefore, we propose a process for collaborative API proposal management using collaboration engineering. Furthermore, we develop and evaluate a prototype supporting this collaborative API proposal management process, which is designed using a design science approach and is evaluated in an action research case study. The evaluation results show, that the presented collaborative API proposal management prototype was perceived as useful and meets usability requirements.

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Towards a Process and Tool Support for Collaborative API Proposal Management

The number of publicly offered Web APIs has increased continuously over the last decade (Santos 2017) since successful public Web API initiatives provide a new source of profitability for organizations. Nevertheless, such initiatives are only successful, if the functionality or data offered is actually demanded by third-party developers and the API design meets developers’ expectations. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, there are currently no processes or tools enabling the direct influence of API consumers on the design of public Web APIs. Therefore, we propose a process for collaborative API proposal management using collaboration engineering. Furthermore, we develop and evaluate a prototype supporting this collaborative API proposal management process, which is designed using a design science approach and is evaluated in an action research case study. The evaluation results show, that the presented collaborative API proposal management prototype was perceived as useful and meets usability requirements.