Empirically Evolving a Model of the Information-Seeking Behaviour of Industrial Programmers

Several authors have proposed information-seeking as an appropriate perspective for studying software maintenance activities. However, there is little research in the literature describing holistic information-seeking models in this context. Instead, researchers have concentrated on the related fields of software comprehension and software tool development. The work in software comprehension, while providing a cognitive basis for describing software maintenance activities, is abstract in nature and cannot provide strong guidance to those that aim to support software maintenance engineers. In addition, work in this area has been marked by a distinct lack of empirical studies of programmers’ actual information needs, during their real-world maintenance tasks. Correspondingly, the work on software tool development, which largely depends on this work, also suffers. This thesis focuses on maintenance programmers’ information-seeking behaviour to address this gap and makes three core contributions to the field. Firstly, it proposes a holistic model of programmers’ information-seeking behaviour, derived from related information-seeking research from other domains. Secondly, it derives and presents an analysis schema (Coding Manual) that allows programmers’ talk-aloud to be characterised and subsequently analysed in the context of this model. Thirdly, it presents eight empirical studies that serve to evaluate and refine the proposed preliminary information-seeking model for programmers involved in software maintenance activities (using this schema). This evaluation largely validated the model but also suggested several important refinements. Indeed, the results are highly consistent with the ‘Concept Location’ research of Rajlich et al. and with Marchioninni’s information-seeking work. The case studies, their results, and their impact on the proposed information-seeking model are discussed in this thesis along with recommendations for further research based on its findings.