Foraging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost

@article{Piorkowski2016ForagingAN,
  title={Foraging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost},
  author={David Piorkowski and Austin Z. Henley and Tahmid Nabi and Scott D. Fleming and Christopher Scaffidi and Margaret M. Burnett},
  journal={Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering},
  year={2016}
}
Empirical studies have revealed that software developers spend 35%–50% of their time navigating through source code during development activities, yet fundamental questions remain: Are these percentages too high, or simply inherent in the nature of software development? Are there factors that somehow determine a lower bound on how effectively developers can navigate a given information space? Answering questions like these requires a theory that captures the core of developers' navigation… 
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Citation Type

Version Control Systems: An Information Foraging Perspective
TLDR
Using the lens of Information Foraging Theory (IFT), new insights not revealed by the prior empirical work are presented and some evidence as to IFT's scoping and utility for the version control domain is provided.
How end-user programmers debug visual web-based programs: An information foraging theory perspective
Facilitating end-user developers by estimating time cost of foraging a webpage
TLDR
Operationalizable constructs from Information Foraging Theory are used to identify two features: information accumulation and information amount for a webpage, which it is hypothesized could assist developers in selecting appropriate webpages.
Toward Foraging for Understanding of StarCraft Agents: An Empirical Study
TLDR
A formative study into how experienced users foraged in the domain of StarCraft to assess an agent showed that participants faced difficult foraging problems.
Toward Principles for the Design of Navigation Affordances in Code Editors: An Empirical Investigation
TLDR
A between-subjects empirical study comparing the navigation behaviors of 32 professional LabVIEW programmers using two different code-editor interfaces: the ubiquitous tabbed editor and the experimental Patchworks editor proposes five general principles for the design of effective navigation affordances in code editors.
Foraging goes mobile: Foraging while debugging on mobile devices
TLDR
The results show ways prior foraging research results from desktop IDEs generalize to mobile IDEs and ways they do not, and point to challenging open research questions for foraging on mobile environments.
How the Experts Do It: Assessing and Explaining Agent Behaviors in Real-Time Strategy Games
TLDR
Insight is provided into shoutcasters' foraging strategies for gleaning information necessary to assess and explain the players; a characterization of the types of implicit questions shoutcasters answered; and implications for creating explanations by using the patterns and abstraction levels these human experts revealed.
Creating Socio-Technical Patches for Information Foraging: A Requirements Traceability Case Study
  • Darius Cepulis, Nan Niu
  • Computer Science
    2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)
  • 2018
TLDR
This work examines requirements socio-technical graphs to describe the key relationships that a patch should encode to assist in a requirements traceability task, and presents an algorithm, based on spreading activation, which extracts a relevant set of these relationships as a patch.
Designing affordances for navigating information spaces in code editors
  • Austin Z. Henley
  • Computer Science
    2016 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)
  • 2016
TLDR
Navigating information spaces is a fundamental yet challenging task for software developers and is further complicated by programmers' rapidly changing information goals and mental models of the information as they navigate.
Supporting Code Comprehension via Annotations: Right Information at the Right Time and Place
TLDR
It is found that having the right information at the right time and place leads to increased accuracy and reduced cognitive load during code comprehension tasks, without sacrificing the usability of developer tools.
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