An Information Foraging Theory Perspective on Tools for Debugging, Refactoring, and Reuse Tasks

This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by the Association for Computing Machinery and can be found at: http://tosem.acm.org/. © ACM, 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, VOL# 22, ISS# 2, (March 2013) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2430545.2430551Theories of human behavior are an important but largely untapped resource for software engineering\ud research. They facilitate understanding of human developers’ needs and activities, and thus can serve as a\ud valuable resource to researchers designing software engineering tools. Furthermore, theories abstract\ud beyond specific methods and tools to fundamental principles that can be applied to new situations. Toward\ud filling this gap, we investigate the applicability and utility of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) for\ud understanding information-intensive software engineering tasks, drawing upon literature in three areas:\ud debugging, refactoring, and reuse. In particular, we focus on software engineering tools that aim to\ud support information-intensive activities, that is, activities in which developers spend time seeking\ud information. Regarding applicability, we consider whether and how the mathematical equations within\ud IFT can be used to explain why certain existing tools have proven empirically successful at helping\ud software engineers. Regarding utility, we applied an IFT perspective to identify recurring design patterns\ud in these successful tools, and consider what opportunities for future research are revealed by our IFT\ud perspective