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

Abstract

Theories of human behavior are an important but largely untapped resource for software engineering research. They facilitate understanding of human developers' needs and activities, and thus can serve as a valuable resource to researchers designing software engineering tools. Furthermore, theories abstract beyond specific methods and tools to fundamental principles that can be applied to new situations. Toward filling this gap, we investigate the applicability and utility of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) for understanding information-intensive software engineering tasks, drawing upon literature in three areas: debugging, refactoring, and reuse. In particular, we focus on software engineering tools that aim to support information-intensive activities, that is, activities in which developers spend time seeking information. Regarding applicability, we consider whether and how the mathematical equations within IFT can be used to explain why certain existing tools have proven empirically successful at helping software engineers. Regarding utility, we applied an IFT perspective to identify recurring design patterns in these successful tools, and consider what opportunities for future research are revealed by our IFT perspective.

Stakeholders' social interaction in requirements engineering of open source software

“…Other studies (including our own) widened the theory's scope of applicability from requirements and architecture to refactoring and reuse [67,80,101,141,142,180]. Common to all the studies is the key role played by cues.…”

“…Cues, such as call dependencies and lexical similarities in the code base, are signposts that exist only in the environment [104]. Meanwhile the cues can be annotated, decorated, or otherwise brought to attention for the predator (i.e., software developer) to improve the foraging efficiency [67].…”

“…So far, foraging theory has mainly focused on information seeking by the solitary developer [67,80,101,102,103,104,141,142,180]. However, today's software (especially OSS) is rarely developed by soloists but is the result of collective efforts.…”

“…Pirolli's information foraging theory [157] uses our animal ancestors' "built-in" food-foraging mechanisms [178] to understand human information seeking and gathering in the vastness of the Web. By modeling software developer as predator and relevant information as prey, researchers were able to better understand developer's behavior in debugging, requirements tracing, and other information-intensive activities [101,102,103,104,141,142,180], and further suggest tool enhancements in a principled manner [67,80].…”

Evolution of sustained foraging in three-dimensional environments with physics

“…The method of stochastic optimization is a prime example of this influence, with the development of well-established search algorithms such as ant colony optimization (ACO) [16], as well as particle swarm optimization (PSO) [17]; more recent search heuristics based on foraging concepts are the bacterial foraging optimization algorithm (BFOA) [18], and artificial bee colony (ABC) [19]. Information foraging theory (IFT), which is a direct application of optimal foraging theory, has deeply altered human-computer interaction research [20,21], and has recently been applied to software engineering [22]. Coordination displayed by foraging social insects inspire new heuristics in robotics for navigation [23], homing [24], and division of labor [25].…”