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

David Piorkowski, Austin Z. Henley, Tahmid Nabi, S. Fleming, Christopher Scaffidi, M. Burnett
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引用次数: 26

Abstract

Empirical studies have revealed that software developers spend 35%–50% of their time navigating through source code during development activities, yet fundamental questions remain: Are these percentages too high, or simply inherent in the nature of software development? Are there factors that somehow determine a lower bound on how effectively developers can navigate a given information space? Answering questions like these requires a theory that captures the core of developers' navigation decisions. Therefore, we use the central proposition of Information Foraging Theory to investigate developers' ability to predict the value and cost of their navigation decisions. Our results showed that over 50% of developers' navigation choices produced less value than they had predicted and nearly 40% cost more than they had predicted. We used those results to guide a literature analysis, to investigate the extent to which these challenges are met by current research efforts, revealing a new area of inquiry with a rich and crosscutting set of research challenges and open problems.
觅食和导航,从根本上说:开发者对价值和成本的预测
经验研究表明,软件开发人员在开发活动中花费了35%-50%的时间来浏览源代码,然而基本的问题仍然存在:这些百分比是否太高,或者仅仅是软件开发的本质所固有的?是否存在某种因素以某种方式决定了开发人员如何有效地驾驭给定信息空间的下限?回答这些问题需要一个理论来抓住开发人员导航决策的核心。因此,我们使用信息觅食理论的中心命题来研究开发人员预测其导航决策的价值和成本的能力。我们的结果显示,超过50%的开发者的导航选择产生的价值低于他们的预期,近40%的导航选择的成本高于他们的预期。我们使用这些结果来指导文献分析,以调查当前研究工作应对这些挑战的程度,揭示一个具有丰富和横切研究挑战和开放问题的新研究领域。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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