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I need your responses to my API Documentation Survey

Series: API documentation survey

by Tom Johnson on Dec 12, 2014
categories: api-doc

  1. 1.0 → I need your responses to my API Documentation Survey
  2. 1.1 API doc survey: The most popular type of APIs that technical writers document
  3. 1.2 API doc survey: The most common programming languages tech writers know
  4. 1.3 API doc survey: Authoring tools preferred by API documentation writers
  5. 1.4 API doc survey: Do you create API doc by looking at source code?
  6. 1.5 API doc survey: Do you test out the API calls used in your doc yourself?
  7. 1.6 API doc survey: What IDE do you use?
  8. 1.7 API doc survey result: Automating REST API documentation
  9. 1.8 API doc survey result: How do you get the source files that contain code comments?
  10. 1.85 API doc survey result: How to learn what you need to know?
  11. 1.9 API doc survey: Most challenging aspect of API documentation
  12. 2.0 API doc survey: Do engineers write API doc in the source code?
  13. 2.1 API doc survey: How much of your doc process is automated?
  14. 2.2 Most important factor in APIs is complete and accurate documentation

I'm trying to gather more information about common practices with API documentation. I created an informal, open survey about API Doc here.

It's an openly editable Google Doc with about 10 questions. You can see others' responses as you enter your own.

If you do any kind of API documentation, I need your participation in the survey. This will allow me to better generalize common practices with API documentation in preparation for some upcoming presentations and blog posts.

I made it open so you can read the existing responses. I chose to use a short-answer response format because practices with API documentation vary so widely -- one practice often varies from another, and they can't easily be captured with simple radio button responses.

I'm hoping to get 25 responses so that I have a decent enough sample size. Right now I have about 10 responses. Basically, when I give some API doc presentations and someone asks me a question like, "Do developers expect you to learn everything from reading the source code files alone?" I want to provide a realistic answer that extends beyond the scope of my own experience.

Again, here's the link to my API Documentation survey. Thanks.

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

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