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Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have become prevalent in today’s software systems and services. APIs are basically a technical means to realize the co-operation between software systems or services. While there are several guidelines for API development, the actually applied practices and challenges are less clear. To better understand the state of the practice of API development and management in the industry, we conducted a descriptive case study in four Finnish software companies: two consultancy companies developing software for their customers, and two companies developing their software products. As a result, we identified five different usage scenarios for APIs and emphasize that diversity of usage should be taken into account more explicitly especially in research. API development and technical management are well supported by the existing tools and technologies especially available from the cloud technology. This leaves as the main challenge the selection of the right technology from the existing technology stack. Documentation and usability are practical issues to be considered and often less rigorously addressed. However, understanding what kind of API management model to apply for the business context appears as the major challenge. We also suggest considering APIs more clearly a separate concern in the product management with specific practices, such as API roadmapping.

Internet of Things (IoT) are in full expansion. Applications range from factory floors to smart city environments. IoT applications consist of battery powered small computing devices (motes) that communicate wirelessly and interact with the environment through sensors and actuators. A key challenge that IoT engineers face is how to manage such systems that are subject to inherent uncertainties in their operation contexts, such as interferences and dynamic traffic in the network. Often these uncertainties are difficult to predict at development time. In practice, IoT applications are therefore typically over-provisioned at deployment; however, this leads to inefficiency. In this paper, we make a case for IoT applications that manage themselves at runtime to deal with uncertainties. We contribute: (1) a set of concerns that motivate the need for self-management for IoT systems, (2) three initial approaches that illustrate the potential of realising self-managing IoT systems, and (3) a set of open challenges for future research on self-adaptation in IoT. ispartof: pages:67-84 ispartof: SOFSEM 2018: THEORY AND PRACTICE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE vol:10706 pages:67-84 ispartof: International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science location:Vienna date:29 Jan - 2 Feb 2018 status: published