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Categorizing developer information needs in software ecosystems

Published: 19 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

We present the results of an investigation into the nature of the information needs of software developers who work in projects that are part of larger ecosystems. In an open-question survey we asked framework and library developers about their information needs with respect to both their upstream and downstream projects. We investigated what kind of information is required, why is it necessary, and how the developers obtain this information. The results show that the downstream needs are grouped into three categories roughly corresponding to the different stages in their relation with an upstream: selection, adoption, and co-evolution. The less numerous upstream needs are grouped into two categories: project statistics and code usage. The current practices part of the study shows that to satisfy many of these needs developers use non-specific tools and ad hoc methods. We believe that this is a largely unexplored area of research.

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  • (2023)A systematic literature review on trust in the software ecosystemEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-022-10238-y28:1Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
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cover image ACM Conferences
WEA 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 International Workshop on Ecosystem Architectures
August 2013
30 pages
ISBN:9781450323147
DOI:10.1145/2501585
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 19 August 2013

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Author Tags

  1. Software ecosystems
  2. frameworks and libraries
  3. grounded theory
  4. open source software
  5. program comprehension
  6. programmer needs

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Dependency Update Strategies and Package CharacteristicsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/360311032:6(1-29)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Investigating the Resolution of Vulnerable Dependencies with Dependabot Security Updates2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00042(234-246)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2023)A systematic literature review on trust in the software ecosystemEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-022-10238-y28:1Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
  • (2021)Analyzing and Visualizing Projects and their Relations in Software Ecosystems2021 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)10.1109/VISSOFT52517.2021.00020(105-109)Online publication date: Sep-2021
  • (2020)Two Decades of Empirical Research on Developers' Information NeedsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops10.1145/3387940.3391485(71-77)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2020
  • (2020)A Qualitative Study of Dependency Management and Its Security ImplicationsProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3372297.3417232(1513-1531)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2020
  • (2019)Resource Demand Management in Java EcosystemProceedings of the XV Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems10.1145/3330204.3330212(1-8)Online publication date: 20-May-2019
  • (2019)How Developers Diagnose Potential Security Vulnerabilities with a Static Analysis ToolIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2018.281011645:9(877-897)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
  • (2019)Categorizing the Content of GitHub README FilesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-018-9660-324:3(1296-1327)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2019
  • (2019)Improving access to API documentation for developers with Docs‐as‐Code‐as‐a‐serviceProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.2018.1450550117155:1(908-910)Online publication date: Feb-2019
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