Can information foraging pick the fix? A field study

Authors:
Joseph Lawrance;Rachel Bellamy;Margaret Bumett;Kyle Rector
Affiliations:
Oregon State University, USA;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA;Oregon State University, USA;Oregon State University, USA
Venue:
VLHCC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Year:
2008

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Abstract

Previous findings have revealed the ability of information foraging to model or predict where developers will navigate within source code. However, the previous investigation did not consider whether the places developers went were the right places to go. In this paper, we present afield study in which we investigated over 200 open source bug reports and feature requests. We analyzed the textual similarity of these issues in relation to the source code, and determined what files developers had changed to fix these issues. Our results demonstrate that information scent can narrow down quite well where developers should make fixes, implying that future software navigation tools can predict the appropriate places to make fixes based solely on the contents of the issue and the source code.