In more news from the conference acceptance front, our CHI paper “The Whats and Hows of Programmers’ Foraging Diets” has also been accepted. This paper examines how programmers forage for information while they are debugging and in particular pays specific attention to the types of information they seek. These participants were trying to track down a Java bug in JEdit using Eclipse.

The findings of this paper include the fact that participants used very diverse strategies to pursue the same task, that the participants’ enrichment strategies of searching and breakpoint debugging (that is, modifying the environment by providing information) were very repetitive, and the fact that participants often foraged for information within a single information patch (especially participants who scanned the package explorer and the outline view thoroughly).

I’ll do a more detailed writeup on this paper soon, when the camera-ready version is prepared!

D. Piorkowski, S. D. Fleming, I. Kwan, M. Burnett, C. Scaffidi, R. Bellamy, J. Jordhal. The Whats and Hows of Programmers’ Foraging Diets, to appear in ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (CHI), Paris, France, 2013.