Software specialists increasingly find themselves in situations where their application programming interface (API)-related decisions have implications on software business. We present a strategic API framework to aid in consideration of business concerns when designing, updating, or maintaining APIs.

Emerging Perspectives of Application Programming Interface Strategy: A Framework to Respond to Business Concerns

Driven by business interests, (product/customer) value has become a critical topic in system and software engineering as well as enterprise planning. The conceptual modeling community has responded to this challenge with several modeling approaches, including $\hbox {e}^{3}$ value modeling, focusing on capturing and analyzing value flows in value networks. This modeling approach has risen from practical e-commerce experiences and has been further studied in an academic context. In this experience paper, we report the advantages and disadvantages of applying $\hbox {e}^{3}$ value modeling as part of a cross-company case study focusing on understanding the internal and external value of APIs from a strategic perspective. We found that value modeling was generally well-received and understood by the company representatives, but also found drawbacks when used in our context, including challenges in modeling internal value networks, capturing problematic or missing values, finding quantitative value measures, and showing underlying motivations for flows. Our findings can help to improve language aspects, methods and tools, and can help to guide future value analysis in similar contexts.

Experiences Applying $$\hbox {e}^{3}$$ Value Modeling in a Cross-Company Study

Application Programming Interface (APIs) provide access to business assets such as data and services. Decisions associated with the implementation of new APIs or change to existing ones may lead to substantial implications on the business value that APIs provide. As such, governance over APIs should be one of the main concerns for organizations that employ APIs as part of their business. We conducted a design science research aiming to identify the relevant aspects and strategies of API governance. As a result, we present a conceptual framework for guidance over API governance, in a research conducted as part of an on-going project and in collaboration with several largescale companies that make extensive use of APIs. Through the conceptual framework we present the identified relevant aspects, strategies and a proposal for the establishment of a governance board. Keywords-API; aspects; governance; guidance; strategies.

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A Framework for Guidance of API Governance: A Design Science Approach

APIs provide value beyond technical functionality. They enable and manage access to strategic business assets and play a key role in enabling software ecosystems. Existing work has begun to consider the strategic business value of software APIs, but such work has limited analysis capabilities and has not made use of established, structured modeling techniques from software and requirements engineering. Such modeling languages have been used for strategic analysis of ecosystems and value exchange. We believe these techniques expand analysis possibilities for APIs, and we apply them as part of a cross-company case study focused on strategic API planning and analysis. Results show that goal, value, and workflow modeling provide new, API-specific benefits that include mapping the API ecosystem, facilitating incremental API planning, understanding dynamic API-specific roles, identifying bottlenecks in API change workflows, and identifying API value.

Modeling Support for Strategic API Planning and Analysis

It is beneficial to understand the benefits and drawbacks of enterprise modeling approaches in certain contexts. We report experiences applying different combinations of three modeling approaches to industrial cases. Specifically, we report on experiences from four companies using a combination of goal modeling, e3 value modeling, and workflow modeling. Our findings help to guide enterprise modeling approach selection in similar contexts, and can be used to make recommendations to improve future applications of the selected modeling approaches.

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Goals, Workflow, and Value: Case Study Experiences with Three Modeling Frameworks

The case company in this study develops different mechatronic devices for its customers around the world. Customers who use these products, do so with an application software to access the business assets of the company through an API (Application Programming Interface). The company wants to improve on its API management strategy which is expected to solve some of the bottlenecks they have in their current workflow. Our focus is to investigate how goaland process models can be used to effectively capture dynamic and static aspects of an API ecosystem. We also investigate how the models can be improved for the purpose of analyzing an API ecosystem design. Four models were created, modelling the current and future workflow and API ecosystem design of the case company (one goal model and one process model for each scenario). To help answering the research questions, the models were analyzed using systematic forward goal model analysis. An evaluation of the models in terms of effectiveness and expressiveness was also addressed. Keywords—software ecosystem, goal model, process model, API design, workflow

/pdf/an-empirical-investigation-of-the-use-of-goal-and-process-7cw20zxlno.pdf

Martina Freiholtz

Papers

Modeling Support for Strategic API Planning and Analysis

Goals, Workflow, and Value: Case Study Experiences with Three Modeling Frameworks

An Empirical Investigation of the Use of Goal and Process Modelling to Analyze API Ecosystem Design and Usage Workflow