Software Practitioners' Information Needs and Sources: A Survey StudyShow others and affiliations
2018 (English)In: Proceedings - 2018 9th International Workshop on Empirical Software Engineering in Practice, IWESEP 2018, IEEE , 2018, p. 1-6Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Software engineering practitioners have information needs to support strategic, tactical and operational decision-making. However, there is scarce research on understanding which information needs exist and how they are currently fulfilled in practice. This study aims to identify the information needs, the frequency of their occurrence, the sources of information used to satisfy the needs, and the perception of practitioners regarding the usefulness of the sources currently used. For this purpose, a literature review was conducted to aggregate the current state of understanding in this area. We built on the results of the literature review and developed further insights through in-depth interviews with 17 practitioners. We further triangulated the findings from these two investigations by conducting a web-based survey (with 83 completed responses). Based on the results, we infer that information regarding product design, product architecture and requirements gathering are the most frequently faced needs. Software practitioners mostly use blogs, community forums, product documentation, and discussion with colleagues to address their information needs.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE , 2018. p. 1-6
Series
International Workshop on Empirical Software Engineering in Practice, ISSN 2333-519X
Keywords [en]
evidence-based software engineering, EBSE, Information retrieval, knowledge sharing
National Category
Software Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:bth-17830DOI: 10.1109/IWESEP.2018.00009ISI: 000462914400001ISBN: 978-1-7281-0439-3 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:bth-17830DiVA, id: diva2:1305726
Conference
9th International Workshop on Empirical Software Engineering in Practice (IWESEP), DEC 04, 2018, Nara, JAPAN
2019-04-182019-04-182019-06-28Bibliographically approved