Contextualizing the Information-Seeking Behavior of Software Engineers

Information seeking in the workplace can vary substantially from one search to the next due to changes in the context of the search. Modeling these dynamic contextual effects is an important challenge facing the research community because it has the potential to lead to more responsive search systems. With this motivation, a study of software engineers was conducted to understand the role that contextual factors play in shaping their information-seeking behavior. Research was conducted in the field in a large technology company and comprised six unstructured interviews, a focus group, and 13 in-depth, semistructured interviews. Qualitative analysis revealed a set of contextual factors and related information behaviors. Results are formalized in the contextual model of source selection, the main contributions of which are the identification of two types of conditioning variables (requirements and constraints) that mediate between the contextual factors and source-selection decisions, and the articulation of dominant source-selection patterns. The study has implications for the design of context-sensitive search systems in this domain and may inform contextual approaches to information seeking in other professional domains.