API Documentation Best Practices Questions

This topic covers best practices for documenting application programming interfaces so that developer users can discover, understand, and integrate with services reliably. Candidates should discuss clear and discoverable reference pages that include concise descriptions of endpoints, parameter definitions, request and response formats, and status codes, along with example requests and responses. Address documentation of authentication and authorization flows, pagination, rate limiting, idempotency, and error handling, as well as versioning and deprecation policies. Candidates should explain how to leverage machine readable specifications such as the OpenAPI specification to generate synchronized reference documentation and code samples, strategies for testing and validating example code, and continuous integration workflows to keep examples and specifications up to date. Also discuss audience segmentation with quick start guides for beginners, tutorials for common tasks, and deep dives for advanced integrators, and how to measure developer success through metrics like time to first successful call, error rates, and developer support volume.