Unifying Software Engineering Methods and Tools: Principles and Patterns from Information Foraging

Theories of human behavior are an important but largely untapped resource for software engineering research. They are important because lack of understanding of human software developers’ needs and activities can mean that important software engineering breakthroughs never get used outside the lab. Furthermore, theory abstracts beyond specific methods and tools to fundamental principles that can be applied to new situations. However, there is a caveat: to be an effective foundation for software engineering research, a human behavioral theory must not only be applicable to the field, but also be useful to researchers without backgrounds in psychology. Toward filling this gap, we investigate the applicability and utility of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) for understanding information-intensive software engineering tasks, drawing upon literature in three areas—debugging, refactoring, and reuse. We abstract from this literature to IFT constructs, showing that IFT can describe information-intensive software engineering activities in ways that explain why many tools and related methods succeeded; that IFT can unify information-intensive activities of software developers under a common theoretical framework; that IFT can uncover new research opportunities in multiple areas; and that IFT can reveal design patterns enabling software engineering researchers without backgrounds in psychology to take practical advantage of this theory.