![](https://static0.smartbear.co/smartbearbrand/media/images/state-of-software-quality/sosq-section-dots.svg)
Important Features
Most Organizations Who Have External APIs Expose Them Through API Gateways
When it comes to exposing public APIs, we wanted to know which developer API portal, management and gateway tools were used by respondents. The results showed that 80% of survey participants expose third party APIs with the most common way to do so using an “API Gateway” (slightly less than one third) followed by “API Management Tools” (about one fifth).
Show Me How it's Done....Examples are The Most Important Aspect of API Documentation
For this question, we asked participants to select the top five most important aspects of documentation. Respondents expressed their favoritism for “Examples in API Documentation” (66%) followed by “Status and Errors” (59%), “Authentication” (55%), “Parameters” (50%) and “HTTP Requests” (49%) rounding out the top five.
Segmenting by role, we found the most popular role of survey respondents, QA Engineers/Automation Engineers, placed the top importance, evenly, on four specific aspects of documentation: “Examples”, “HTTP Requests”, “Parameters” and “Status and Errors”.