The Whats and Hows of Programmers' Foraging Diets: CHI 2013 Video Preview
Channel: EmeraldArcana
Date: 2013-04-18

For a link to a preprint of the research paper, visit http://irwinhkwan.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/piorkowski-2013-chi-programmersforagingdiets.pdf

One of the least studied areas of Information Foraging The-ory 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 investi-gate "what" and "how" questions like these for the domain of software debugging, we qualitatively analyzed 9 profes-sional developers' foraging goals, goal patterns, and strate-gies. 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 gen-eral, programmers' foraging strategies leaned more heavily toward enrichment than we expected, but different strate-gies 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.