Making Useful Programming Objects Available for a Programmer: at the Right Time in the Right Way through the Right Peers

Programming is a complex ill-defined problem-solving task. It requires not only knowledge in the head of a programmer, but also existing information in the world and relevant knowledge of his/her peers in the community. Traditional software reuse techniques do not serve for programmers to a full extent because they are not built from this perspective. Our research addresses the issue from a cognitive perspective, trying to help a programmer reuse existing software objects from software repositories and locate peer programmers who can help him/her solving the current task even when (1) the programmer is not aware of his/her information needs, (2) does not know that potentially useful information exist, and (3) does not know how to ask for help in related programming communities. This paper discusses the design principle called layered information-on-demand that guides the location and presentation of external information and knowledge in response to an individual’s unique information needs determined by his/her current task and background knowledge. The principle is illustrated with the CodeBroker system and the UMCM (user-modeling and community-modeling) engine. 1