Developers’ Foraging Behavior on Stack Overflow

Abstract

Stack Overflow is the most popular platform for developers to exchange knowledge on software engineering tasks. Developers spend large portions of their time trying to find relevant questions and answers. However, Stack Overflow contains tremendous amounts of noisy and redundant questions and answers. This becomes costly in terms of time as well as cognitive load on developers. To understand information-seeking behavior, we used Information Foraging Theory (IFT). We conducted a gender-balanced, think-aloud study with 12 participants (6 students and 6 professionals) where they completed a debugging task. We investigated the cues associated with participants' actions through the lens of IFT.