TY  - JOUR
AU  - Sharif, Khaironi Yatim 
AU  - Mokhtar, Mohd Rosmadi 
AU  - Buckley, Jim 
PY  - 2011
TI  - Open Source Programmers' Information Seeking During Software Maintenance
JF  - Journal of Computer Science
VL  - 7
IS  - 7
DO  - 10.3844/jcssp.2011.1060.1071
UR  - https://thescipub.com/abstract/jcssp.2011.1060.1071
AB  - Problem statement: Several authors have proposed information seeking as an appropriate
case study for studying software maintenance and evolution that have provided empirical
classifications of information seeking in commercial software evolution settings. Approach: However,
there is minimal research in the literature describing the information seeking behavior of Open Source
programmers, even though Open Source contexts would seem to exacerbate the information seeking
problems to a certain extend; where team members are typically delocalized from each other and they
are often forced into asynchronous communication. Results: This study reports on an empirical study
that classifies Open-Source programmers' information needs generated through open-coding of
questions that appear on developers' mailing lists. Based on the generated Information Seeking
Schema (ISS), details of the information sought by programmers on 6 different mailing lists over
several years are analyzed and discussed. Conclusion/Recommendations: The result shows several
interesting findings that describe the programmers' information needs across the mailing lists. Firstly,
there are a similar pattern of information artifact and attribute across all projects. Secondly, majority of
the programmers' information seeking concentrated on the systems' implementations. Thirdly, the OS
programmers have also shown to be team-oriented and they tended to rely on documentation more
than what have previously reported. These results suggest the applicability of the ISS in evaluating OS
programmers information seeking.