Modelling the information-seeking behaviour of programmers - an empirical approach

Information seeking has been recognised as a core subtask in software maintenance. This paper reviews, merges, and adapts existing information seeking models for different domains to propose a nonlinear information-seeking model for programmers involved in software maintenance. Talk-aloud data from two empirical studies of industrial programmers carrying out real software maintenance tasks is presented, to illustrate and validate (in part) this model.