Seminar by Dr. Houari A. Sahraoui (Université de Montréal)

Speaker: Dr. Houari A. Sahraoui
                Université de Montréal

Title: Coping with APIs Usability Problems: a Holistic and Pragmatic Vision

Date: Thursday, November 24th, 2016

Time: 11 a.m

Place: EV2.184

ABSTRACT

APIs are widely used in modern software applications. Any developer has to learn and correctly use a large number of APIs to perform his tasks. Additionally, an incorrect use of an API may result in various types of issues in client programs. Although a considerable effort has been dedicated to adequately document the APIs, many usage constraints and patterns are not explicitly documented or their documentation is spread over many API’s elements. Moreover, such constraints and patterns might be at different levels of usage (method, API, group of APIs), which limits the coverage of the existing constraint and pattern discovery approaches. This talk reflects on different API usability problems, and discusses research venues to address these problems in realistic settings.

BIO

Houari A. Sahraoui is professor and chair at the department of computer science and operations research of Université de Montréal. His research interests include software engineering automation, model-driven engineering, software visualization, and search-based software engineering. He has published around 200 research papers, edited three books, and gives regularly invited talks. He has served as a general chair of IEEE/ACM ASE and IEEE VISSOFT, a PC co-chair of IEEE VISSOFT, a program committee member in several IEEE and ACM conferences, a member of the editorial boards of four journals, and an organization member of many conferences and workshops.