Observation of open source programmers information seeking

Several authors have proposed information seeking as an appropriate perspective for studying software evolution, and have characterized information seeking empirically in commercial software evolution settings. However, there is little research in the literature describing the information seeking behavior of open source programmers. This work describes a holistic schema for open- source (OS) programmers’ information seeking, generated through open-coding of questions in OS developer mailing lists. It then reports on a study of the JDT mailing list, showing the types of information sought within this group and, for a subset of the data, it characterizes the responses obtained.