Using Contextual Information to Improve Awareness in Software Development

Authors

Abstract

The use of contextual information is said to improve awareness in software development. But the context of a software developer is something hard to define and capture, as it represents a complex network of elements across different dimensions, that is not limited to the work developed on an IDE. We propose a software developer context model composed of four layers: personal, project, organization and domain. We describe this context model at the personal layer, present a prototype and discuss the results of an experiment conducted with a group of developers. The results show that developers consider the use of contextual information relevant to improve information retrieval, ranking and filtering, but usability plays an important role on how these improvements are perceived.

Keywords

Software Development, Context, Information Retrieval

Subject

Context-Based Information Retrieval

Related Project

SDiC: Software Development in Context

Conference

23rd International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE), July 2011