  With the advent and proliferation of online developer forums as informal
documentation, developers often share their opinions about the APIs they use.
Thus, opinions of others often shape the developer's perception and decisions
related to software development. For example, the choice of an API or how to
reuse the functionality the API offers are, to a considerable degree,
conditioned upon what other developers think about the API. While many
developers refer to and rely on such opinion-rich information about APIs, we
found little research that investigates the use and benefits of public
opinions. To understand how developers seek and evaluate API opinions, we
conducted two surveys involving a total of 178 software developers. We analyzed
the data in two dimensions, each corresponding to specific needs related to API
reviews: (1) Needs for seeking API reviews, and (2) Needs for automated tool
support to assess the reviews. We observed that developers seek API reviews and
often have to summarize those for diverse development needs (e.g., API
suitability). Developers also make conscious efforts to judge the
trustworthiness of the provided opinions and believe that automated tool
support for API reviews analysis can assist in diverse development scenarios,
including, for example, saving time in API selection as well as making informed
decisions on a particular API features.
