An Exploratory Field Study of Programmer Assistance-Seeking during Software Development

Abstract

Developers often face a dilemma: to seek assistance from a colleague or to expend effort to answer a question herself. On one hand, seeking help is fast and reliable. But on the other, seeking assistance can distract colleagues and reduce their productivity. In this paper, we report our preliminary findings of assistance-seeking from an observational study at a medium-sized software company. We found that developers have varying levels of spoken communication when seeking help. We believe this is correlated with their different years of experience working as developers, among other factors. We also found that many employees would avoid asking for help several times due to various work-related and reported personal reasons. This has driven us to explore a new, exciting research area discovering the complexities of developers seeking help. This paper is our first analysis of this kind, and we hope to receive the community's feedback before continued work.