Determining the viability for consumers of autogenerated Software Development Kits for Web APIs

Abstract

In this age of web APIs serving as the backbone of millions of services on the Internet, the developers aiming to make use of these existing services have to adapt to the developers providing these services. Whenever the services change, the users of the service have to change accordingly in order to keep using them. As the amount of third-party services used by an application grows, the more this process of adapting whenever something changes becomes more and more infeasible. One of the solutions to this problem is the usage of autogenerated Software Development Kits (SDKs). In this thesis we explore and determine the viability of these SDKs from the perspective of the consumer. We accomplish this by conducting an experiment that lets the participants solve tasks using a web API both with and without an SDKs. Their opinions were collected and manually analysed. Several of the participants were also invited for an in-depth interview regarding their opinions on the SDKs. We concluded that autogenerated SDKs are suitable for internal use in situations with low customization of settings. We also concluded that autogenerated SDKs are not suitable for third-party use.