Assessing the Linguistic Design Quality of APIs of Distributed Systems and Microservices

APIs or Application Programming Interfaces help distributed systems and microservices to expose their functionalities and serve as a means for communication among them. In contrast to a poorly designed API, a well-designed API is easy for users to understand and use. Thus, APIs with high-quality design are essential both for API providers and client developers. This paper aims to assess the linguistic design quality of APIs in distributed systems and microservices by automatically detecting good and poor design practices, commonly known as patterns and antipatterns, respectively. We rely on syntactic and semantic analyses for automatic assessment of the design quality of APIs using detection heuristics. Syntactic analysis involves analyzing the structure and syntax of the APIs, while semantic analysis involves analyzing API documentation, descriptions, and parameters. We achieved an overall accuracy of more than 93% in detecting patterns and antipatterns. Our detection results also suggest that antipatterns are prevalent in the APIs of distributed systems and microservices. Our findings will assist API developers in identifying poor design practices and improving the design quality of their APIs.