一句话：通过访谈16位业界REST API专家，揭示影响API可用性的八项因素以及指南采纳与设计中的挑战和最佳实践。
REST API 已成为 SaaS 时代的核心业务资产，但开发者仍难以设计出有效的 REST API。尽管 Zalando、Microsoft 等提出了流行指南，它们常被认为过于庞大且不适用，许多公司因此自建指南并面临维护挑战。为了改进现状，本文对16位来自业界的 REST API 专家进行访谈研究，旨在实证理解 REST API 指南的采纳、使用与创建过程。研究确定了 API 可用性的概念、影响 REST API 可用性的八项因素，其中对约定的遵循最为重要；同时提炼了指南有效性因素、采纳与设计指南的挑战以及最佳实践。结果表明，指南确实能提升 API 可用性，但开发者对严格指南存在明显抵触；指南规模及其与组织需求的契合度是关键考量，指南需随组织成长，并让所有利益相关者参与开发与维护。自动化 linting 不仅能将合规检查嵌入流程，还可通过教育性解释来证明规则合理性。
REST is today's most widely used architectural style for providing web-based services. In the age of service-orientation—a.k.a. Software as a Service (SaaS)—APIs have become core business assets and can easily expose hundreds of operations. While well-designed APIs contribute to the commercial success of a service, poorly designed APIs can threaten entire organizations. Recognizing their relevance and value, many guidelines have been proposed for designing usable APIs, similar to design patterns and coding standards. For example, Zalando and Microsoft provide popular REST API guidelines. However, they are often considered as too large and inapplicable, so many companies create and maintain their own guidelines, which is a challenge in itself. In practice, however, developers still struggle to design effective REST APIs. To improve the situation, we need to improve our empirical understanding of adopting, using, and creating REST API guidelines. We present an interview study with 16 REST API experts from industry. We determine the notion of API usability, guideline effectiveness factors, challenges of adopting and designing guidelines, and best practices. We identified eight factors influencing REST API usability, among which the adherence to conventions is the most important one. While guidelines can in fact be an effective means to improve API usability, there is significant resistance from developers against strict guidelines. Guideline size and how it fits with organizational needs are two important factors to consider. REST guidelines also have to grow with the organization, while all stakeholders need to be involved in their development and maintenance. Automated linting provides an opportunity to not only embed compliance enforcement into processes, but also to justify guideline rules with educational explanations.
DOI 原文 · arXiv · PDF（开放获取） · DBLP
@inproceedings{abs-2601-16705,
title = {Developer Perspectives on REST API Usability: A Study of REST API Guidelines},
author = {Sven Peldszus and Jan Rutenkolk and Marcel Heide and Jan Sollmann and Benjamin Klatt and Frank Köhne and Thorsten Berger},
booktitle = {FSE},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1145/3803437.3805267}
}