Paper Info
Title
Software Engineers' Information Seeking Behavior in Change Impact Analysis - An Interview Study.
Abstract
Software engineers working in large projects must navigate complex information landscapes. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is a task that relies on engineers' successful information seeking in databases storing, e.g., source code, requirements, design descriptions, and test case specifications. Several previous approaches to support information seeking are task-specific, thus understanding engineers' seeking behavior in specific tasks is fundamental. We present an industrial case study on how engineers seek information in CIA, with a particular focus on traceability and development artifacts that are not source code. We show that engineers have different information seeking behavior, and that some do not consider traceability particularly useful when conducting CIA. Furthermore, we observe a tendency for engineers to prefer less rigid types of support rather than formal approaches, i.e., engineers value support that allows flexibility in how to practically conduct CIA. Finally, due to diverse information seeking behavior, we argue that future CIA support should embrace individual preferences to identify change impact by empowering several seeking alternatives, including searching, browsing, and tracing.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/ICPC.2017.20
ICPC
Keywords
DocType
Volume
information seeking, change impact analysis, traceability, safety-critical systems, case study.
Conference
abs/1703.01897
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1092-8138
978-1-5386-0536-3
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
30
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Markus Borg126029.79
Emil Alégroth24511.36
Per Runeson32869144.10