When APIs are Intentionally Bypassed: An Exploratory Study of API Workarounds

Application programming interfaces (APIs) have become ubiquitous in software development. However, external APIs are not guaranteed to contain every desirable feature, nor are they immune to software defects. Therefore, API users will sometimes be faced with situations where a current API does not satisfy all of their requirements, but migrating to another API is costly. In these cases, due to the lack of communication channels between API developers and users, API users may intentionally bypass an existing API after inquiring into workarounds for their API problems with online communities. This mechanism takes the API developer out of the conversation, potentially leaving API defects unreported and desirable API features undiscovered. In this paper we explore API workaround inquiries from API users on Stack Overflow. We uncover general reasons why API users inquire about API workarounds, and general solutions to API workaround requests. Furthermore, using workaround implementations in Stack Overflow answers, we develop three API workaround implementation patterns. We identify instances of these patterns in real-life open source projects and determine their value for API developers from their responses to feature requests based on the identified API workarounds.