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Open source programmers' information seeking during software maintenance


Citation

Sharif, Khaironi Yatim and Mokhtar, Mohd Rosmadi and Buckley, Jim (2011) Open source programmers' information seeking during software maintenance. Journal of Computer Science, 7 (7). pp. 1060-1071. ISSN 1549-3636; ESSN: 1552-6607

Abstract

Problem statement: Several authors have proposed information seeking as an appropriate case study for studying software maintenance and evolution that have provided empirical classifications of information seeking in commercial software evolution settings. Approach: However, there is minimal research in the literature describing the information seeking behavior of Open Source programmers, even though Open Source contexts would seem to exacerbate the information seeking problems to a certain extend; where team members are typically delocalized from each other and they are often forced into asynchronous communication. Results: This study reports on an empirical study that classifies Open-Source programmers' information needs generated through open-coding of questions that appear on developers' mailing lists. Based on the generated Information Seeking Schema (ISS), details of the information sought by programmers on 6 different mailing lists over several years are analyzed and discussed. Conclusion/Recommendations: The result shows several interesting findings that describe the programmers' information needs across the mailing lists. Firstly, there are a similar pattern of information artifact and attribute across all projects. Secondly, majority of the programmers' information seeking concentrated on the systems' implementations. Thirdly, the OS programmers have also shown to be team-oriented and they tended to rely on documentation more than what have previously reported. These results suggest the applicability of the ISS in evaluating OS programmers information seeking.


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Additional Metadata

Item Type: Article
Divisions: Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology
DOI Number: https://doi.org/10.3844/jcssp.2011.1060.1071
Publisher: Science Publications
Keywords: Information seeking; Information seeking schema; Open source; Probed artifacts; Program comprehension; Software maintenance; Theoretical harness; Theoretical review
Depositing User: Mohamad Jefri Mohamed Fauzi
Date Deposited: 28 Nov 2013 06:41
Last Modified: 09 Oct 2015 08:10
Altmetrics: http://www.altmetric.com/details.php?domain=psasir.upm.edu.my&doi=10.3844/jcssp.2011.1060.1071
URI: http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/18522
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