Information seeking in electronic environments
Information seeking in electronic environments
Exploratory search: from finding to understanding
Communications of the ACM - Supporting exploratory search
Mica: A Web-Search Tool for Finding API Components and Examples
VLHCC '06 Proceedings of the Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Assieme: finding and leveraging implicit references in a web search interface for programmers
Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Two studies of opportunistic programming: interleaving web foraging, learning, and writing code
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Mining search topics from a code search engine usage log
MSR '09 Proceedings of the 2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
How Well Do Search Engines Support Code Retrieval on the Web?
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
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Developers use the Web as a tool to find information to help them solve their software development problems. However, little is known about what kinds of problems motivate developers to do searches on the Web. We asked twenty-five developers to record their Web searches at a medium-sized software company. We also observed twelve developers. In our analysis, we found that there are six main kinds of problems. One, developers want to find procedural information, such as quick references about how to solve some programming problems. Two, developers use the Web as a memory aid to remember details about how to solve a problem they solved before. Three, developers want to solve a knowledge problem, for example, learning some new concepts. Four, developers want to find information to understand and solve errors. Five, developers need information to judge the suitability of software components being evaluated. Finally, in the "Other" category, we included problems such as searching for software to download or translating functions.