An Exploratory Study on Managing and Searching for Documents in Software Engineering Environments

Abstract

A large number of documents are usually produced in the software industry. In this work, we conduct a qualitative study to explore the main practices and challenges related to managing these documents. The results of this study are based on interviews with 13 practitioners from nine companies. The main findings of the study are: (1) much data is stored in e-mails and in meeting protocols, (2) practitioners like wikis, (3) when searching for documents, practitioners would rather browse the structure than use the search function and (4) searching for documents is still a challenge due to the low effectiveness of search functions and the scattering of documents over several locations and tools.