An exploratory study of awareness interests about software modifications

Abstract

As software engineers collaboratively develop software, they need to often analyze past and present program modifications implemented by other developers. While several techniques focus on tool support for investigating past and present software modifications, do these techniques indeed address developers' awareness interests that are important to them? We conducted an initial focus group study and a web survey to understand in which task contexts and how often particular types of awareness-interests arise. Our preliminary study results indicate that developers have daily information needs about code changes that affect or interfere with their code, yet it is extremely challenging for them to identify relevant events out of a large number of change-events.