Developing schema for open source programmers’ information-seeking

Information-seeking has been recognized as a core subtask in software maintenance. While much of the research in this area attempts to identify the information sought by programmers, the work to date has been typically based on pre-defined information types limiting the potential for new information types to arise. Hence, this paper presents a small empirical study on open-source programmer mailing lists, to iteratively refine a schema of the information that programmers seek based exclusively on an analysis of these programmers’ naturalistic communication. Subsequently it places this schema in the context of the existing literature in the area. The analysis was undertaken on information requests in 288 emails, taken from 2 open source project mailing lists; The Java Bean Scripting Framework (BSF)[1] and the Java Development Tool (JDT)[2]. This work produced a preliminary schema of 3 main categories divided into 18 sub categories.