The whats and hows of programmers' foraging diets
Abstract
One of the least studied areas of Information Foraging Theory is diet: the information foragers choose to seek. For example, do foragers choose solely based on cost, or do they stubbornly pursue certain diets regardless of cost? Do their debugging strategies vary with their diets? To investigate "what" and "how" questions like these for the domain of software debugging, we qualitatively analyzed 9 professional developers' foraging goals, goal patterns, and strategies. Participants spent 50% of their time foraging. Of their foraging, 58% fell into distinct dietary patterns - mostly in patterns not previously discussed in the literature. In general, programmers' foraging strategies leaned more heavily toward enrichment than we expected, but different strategies aligned with different goal types. These and our other findings help fill the gap as to what programmers' dietary goals are and how their strategies relate to those goals.
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Developers spend 35%-50% of their time navigating through source code during development activities.
“Empirical studies have revealed that software developers spend 35%-50% of their time navigating through source code during development activities”
From Foraging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost (2016) · cites this paper as [32]
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Henley, A. Z., & Fleming, S. D. (2014) · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2556288.2557073 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
Self-citationForaging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost
Piorkowski, D., Henley, A. Z., Nabi, T., Fleming, S. D., Scaffidi, C., & Burnett, M. (2016) · Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/2950290.2950302 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Piorkowski, D. J., Fleming, S. D., Kwan, I., Burnett, M. M., Scaffidi, C., Bellamy, R. K. E., & Jordahl, J.
- Affiliations
- Oregon State University (US)
- University of Memphis (US)
- IBM (United States) (US)
- Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA
- Venue
- Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2013-04-27
- Pages
- 3063-3072
- OpenAlex
- W1989206341
- Cited by
- 61
- References
- 23
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 4
- FWCI
- 3.75
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
- Keywords
- information foraging, software debugging, programmer behavior, foraging strategies, information seeking, debugging strategies, professional developers
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