Contextualizing the information‐seeking behavior of software engineers

Abstract

Information seeking in the workplace can vary substantially from one search to the next due to changes in the context of the search. Modeling these dynamic contextual effects is an important challenge facing the research community because it has the potential to lead to more responsive search systems. With this motivation, a study of software engineers was conducted to understand the role that contextual factors play in shaping their information‐seeking behavior. Research was conducted in the field in a large technology company and comprised six unstructured interviews, a focus group, and 13 in‐depth, semistructured interviews. Qualitative analysis revealed a set of contextual factors and related information behaviors. Results are formalized in the contextual model of source selection, the main contributions of which are the identification of two types of conditioning variables (requirements and constraints) that mediate between the contextual factors and source‐selection decisions, and the articulation of dominant source‐selection patterns. The study has implications for the design of context‐sensitive search systems in this domain and may inform contextual approaches to information seeking in other professional domains.

A cross-domain analysis of task and genre effects on perceptions of usefulness

“…The first two phases of the study, which have been published elsewhere, provided evidence of a relationship between task and genre (Freund, 2011;Freund et al, 2005). A third study, reported below, was designed to validate and extend these findings by exploring the relationships between specific tasks and genres.…”

“…In the first, interviews with software engineering consultants revealed that the types of tasks in which they are engaged influence the characteristics of information sought and the search strategies employed. One of the key strategies reported was to seek familiar document genres that were known to have the desired characteristics (Freund, 2011). A follow-up study with the same population (Freund et al, 2005) examined the relationship between tasks and genres in a large, shared document repository.…”

“…However, more empirical research is needed to determine the nature and extent of the task-genre relationship as it pertains to information retrieval. A number of studies have shown that document selection in the search process is influenced by genre (Freund, 2011;Freund & Berzowska, 2010; and by task (Freund & Berzowska, 2010;Kelly, 2006;Larsen, Malik, & Tombros, 2008;Tombros, Ruthven, & Jose, 2005), but very little work has looked at the trilateral relationship between task, genre and usefulness.…”

The Information Practices of the Fishermen in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh

“…There have been some studies focusing on information needs and seeking behaviours of diverse communities (e.g., scientists (Niu & Hemminger, 2012;Palmer 1999;Sahu 2013); engineers (Freund 2015); nurses (McKnight 2007;Sundin 2002)). However, very few studies (e.g., Ikoja-Odongo & Ocholla, 2003;Njoku, 2004) focus on information needs and seeking behaviour of fishermen.…”

An Exploratory Study on Managing and Searching for Documents in Software Engineering Environments

“…Plösch et al [7] assessed the most important quality attribute of software documentation via a survey. Related to search of information, Freund [4] explored what contextual factors impact the information seeking behaviour of software engineers. The focus of our work, which is storage and search for documents, is different from the previous studies.…”