What help do developers seek, when and how?

Abstract

Software development often requires knowledge beyond what developers already possess. In such cases, developers have to seek help from different sources of information. As a metacognitive skill, help seeking influences software developers' efficiency and success in many situations. However, there has been little research to provide a systematic investigation of the general process of help seeking activities in software engineering and human and system factors affecting help seeking. This paper reports our empirical study aiming to fill this gap. Our study includes two human experiments, involving 24 developers and two typical software development tasks. Our study gathers empirical data that allows us to provide an in-depth analysis of help-seeking task structures, task strategies, information sources, process model, and developers' information needs and behaviors in seeking and using help information and in managing information during help seeking. Our study provides a detailed understanding of help seeking activities in software engineering, the challenges that software developers face, and the limitations of existing tool support. This can lead to the design and development of more efficient and usable help seeking support that helps developers become better help seekers.