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

Piorkowski, David; Henley, Austin Z.; Nabi, Tahmid; Fleming, Scott; Scaffidi, Christopher; Burnett, Margaret

doi:10.1145/2950290.2950302

Cited by 27 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 47 publications

(55 reference statements)

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“…When there is a mismatch between the expected and actual costs and values, a developer could benefit from a better strategy or tools. For some tasks, foraging consistently delivers less value than expected: in one study, as many as 50% of navigation choices yielded less value than expected, and 40% cost more than expected [25].…”

Section: Information Foraging In Codementioning

confidence: 83%

“…Both professional [32] and hobbyist [5] developers frequently search for code examples. For routine coding, debugging, and maintenance tasks, developers spend a large portion of the time navigating and searching existing code [14,25]. Developers report that understanding existing code is one of the most timeconsuming parts of software development, and that understanding the rationale behind code is a serious challenge [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sadowski

Murphy-Hill

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Without usable and accurate documentation of how to use an API, developers can find themselves deterred from reusing relevant code. In C++, one place developers can find documentation is in a header file. When information is missing, they may look at the corresponding implementation code. To understand what's missing from C++ API documentation and the factors influencing whether it will be fixed, we conducted a mixed-methods study involving two experience sampling surveys with hundreds of developers at the moment they visited implementation code, interviews with 18 of those developers, and interviews with 8 API maintainers. In many cases, updating documentation may provide only limited value for developers, while requiring effort maintainers don't want to invest. We identify a set of questions maintainers and tool developers should consider when improving API-level documentation.

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Section: Information Foraging In Codementioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When not to comment

Head

Sadowski

Murphy-Hill

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

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“…Predators form these perceptions using their prior experience with similar patches [31] and the cues (signposts in their information environment like links and indicators) that point toward various patches. Of course, predators' perceived values and costs are often inaccurate [32].…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…IFT constructs have been used to understand humans' information-seeking behavior in other domains, particularly web navigation [6,9], debugging [8,20,31], and other software development tasks [27,30,32,35]. However, to our knowledge, it has not been used in RTS environments like StarCraft.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Toward Foraging for Understanding of StarCraft Agents

Penney

Dodge

Hilderbrand

et al. 2018

23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces

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Assessing and understanding intelligent agents is a difficult task for users that lack an AI background. A relatively new area, called "Explainable AI," is emerging to help address this problem, but little is known about how users would forage through information an explanation system might offer. To inform the development of Explainable AI systems, we conducted a formative study -using the lens of Information Foraging Theory -into how experienced users foraged in the domain of StarCraft to assess an agent. Our results showed that participants faced difficult foraging problems. These foraging problems caused participants to entirely miss events that were important to them, reluctantly choose to ignore actions they did not want to ignore, and bear high cognitive, navigation, and information costs to access the information they needed. sign further in the Methodology section.) In addition, the participants had functionality to seek additional information about the replay, such as navigating around the game map, drilling down into production information, pausing, rewinding, fast-forwarding, and so on (Figure 1). However, we wanted a higher level of abstraction than features specific to StarCraft. Specifically, we aimed for (1) applicability to other RTS environments, and (2) connection with other research about humans seeking information. To that end, we turned to Information Foraging Theory (IFT).

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Sources of software development task friction

2022

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Given a task description, a developer's job is to alter the software system in a way that accomplishes the task, usually by fixing a bug or adding a new feature. Completing these tasks typically requires developers to use multiple tools, spanning multiple applications, within their environment. In this paper, we investigate how existing desktop environments align with and facilitate developers' needs as they tackle their tasks. We examine how developers use their tools to perform their tasks and the ways in which these tools inhibit development velocity. Through a controlled user study with 17 subjects and a field study with 10 industrial engineers, we found that developers frequently formulate specific objectives, or goals, on-demand as they encounter new information when progressing through their tasks. These goals are often not achievable directly in the environment, forcing developers to translate their task into goals and their goals into the low-level actions provided by the environment. When carrying out these low-level actions, developers routinely perform extra work such as locating and integrating resources and adapting their needs to align with the capabilities of the environment. This extra work acts as a form of friction, limiting how quickly and directly developers can complete their tasks. Much of this extra work exists due to mismatches between current tools and environments and how developers actually work in practice. This work identifies seven types of development friction and provides design recommendations that future tools and environments could use to more effectively help developers complete their tasks.

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

Cited by 27 publications

References 47 publications

When not to comment

When not to comment

Toward Foraging for Understanding of StarCraft Agents

Sources of software development task friction

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