What Should Developers Be Aware Of? An Empirical Study on the Directives   of API Documentation
  Application Programming Interfaces (API) are exposed to developers in order to reuse software libraries. API directives are natural-language statements in API documentation that make developers aware of constraints and guidelines related to the usage of an API. This paper presents the design and the results of an empirical study on the directives of API documentation of object-oriented libraries. Its main contribution is to propose and extensively discuss a taxonomy of 23 kinds of API directives. 
Martin Monperrus (INRIA Lille - Nord Europe), Michael Eichberg, Elif   Tekes, Mira Mezini
cs.SE