The application of content analysis to programmer mailing lists as a requirements method for a software visualisation tool

The study set out to examine the following research question: ‘What types of information are most important to the experienced programmer during maintenance ?’. A content analysis scheme was applied to program summaries extracted from online open source Java mailing lists in order to investigate the information types employed when describing programs. The aim of which was to explore a method of requirements gathering for supportive software visualisation tools. The summaries were examined collectively and also as part of their respective task type categories. It was found that informal programmer comments and data type descriptions were most important.