Information Needs in Collocated Software Development Teams
Abstract
Previous research has documented the fragmented nature of software development work. To explain this in more detail, we analyzed software developers' day-to-day information needs. We observed seventeen developers at a large software company and transcribed their activities in go-minute sessions. We analyzed these logs for the information that developers sought, the sources that they used, and the situations th at prevented inform action from being acquired. We identified twenty-one information types and cataloged the outcome and source when each type of information was sought. The most frequently sought information included awareness about artifacts and coworkers. The most often deferred searches included knowledge about design and program behavior, such as why code was written a particular way, what a program was supposed to do, and the cause of a program state. Developers often had to defer tasks because the only source of knowledge was unavailable coworkers.
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Developers spend a significant amount of time searching and foraging for information and organizing and digesting the information they find.
“Consequently, developers spend a significant amount of time searching and foraging for the information they need and organizing and digesting the information they find [30,31,34,44,48,57].”
From Using an LLM to Help With Code Understanding (2024) · cites this paper as [30]
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Wood, A., Rodeghero, P., Armaly, A., & McMillan, C. (2018) · ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) · doi:10.1145/3236024.3236031 · Cited by 47 · see citing works
SourceVis: Collaborative software visualization for co-located environments
Anslow, C., Marshall, S., Noble, J., & Biddle, R. (2013) · IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT) · doi:10.1109/vissoft.2013.6650527 · Cited by 47 · see citing works
Extracting and answering why and why not questions about Java program output
Ko, A. J., & Myers, B. A. (2010) · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · doi:10.1145/1824760.1824761 · Cited by 45 · see citing works
Self-citationDealing with identifiers and comments in source code comprehension and maintenance
Salviulo, F., & Scanniello, G. (2014) · International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) · doi:10.1145/2601248.2601251 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
Debugging Revisited: Toward Understanding the Debugging Needs of Contemporary Software Developers
Layman, L. M., Diep, M. M., Nagappan, M., Singer, J., DeLine, R. A., & Venolia, G. D. (2013) · Proceedings of the ... ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement/International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement · doi:10.1109/esem.2013.43 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
Self-citationHindle, A., Bird, C., Zimmermann, T., & Nagappan, N. (2012) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsm.2012.6405278 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
Pollock, L., Shanker, V. K., & Hill, E. (2010) · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Ponzanelli, L., Bavota, G., Penta, M. D., Oliveto, R., & Lanza, M. (2015) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-015-9397-1 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Lavallée, M., & Robillard, P. N. (2015) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1109/icse.2015.83 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Servant, F., & Jones, J. A. (2012) · ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) · doi:10.1145/2393596.2393646 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Insights from expert software design practice
Petre, M. (2009) · ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) · doi:10.1145/1595696.1595731 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
Reducing disruption from subtle information delivery during a conversation
Ofek, E., Iqbal, S. T., & Strauß, K. (2013) · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2470654.2466425 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
The Influence of the Task on Programmer Behaviour
Ying, A. T. T., & Robillard, M. P. (2011) · 2011 IEEE 19th International Conference on Program Comprehension · doi:10.1109/icpc.2011.35 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
Information Visualization for Agile Software Development
Paredes, J., Anslow, C., & Maurer, F. (2014) · IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT) · doi:10.1109/vissoft.2014.32 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
Exception handling bug hazards in Android
Coelho, R. D. S., Almeida, L., Gousios, G., Arie Van Deursen, A., & Treude, C. (2016) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-016-9443-7 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
- Authors
- Ko, A. J., DeLine, R., & Venolia, G.
- Affiliations
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- Microsoft (United States) (US)
- Venue
- 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'07)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2007-05
- Pages
- 344-353
- ISSN
- 0270-5257 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2100894766
- Cited by
- 499
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 26 · 2020: 24 · 2019: 22 · 2018: 23 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 25 · 2015: 24 · 2014: 30 · 2013: 40 · 2012: 50
- FWCI
- 27.61
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
- Keywords
- information needs, software development teams, collocated teams, software developers, information seeking, knowledge sources, knowledge sharing
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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